


Can't Go Home This Way

by bomberqueen17



Series: Home Out In The Wind [2]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, BB-8 Ships It, Hurt/Comfort, Major Character Injury, Mutual Pining, Pining, demisexual rey, droid politics, droid rebellion, poe dameron's hair, r2-d2 is a badass, temporary disability, the resistance will not be intimidated, very delayed gratification on the romantic subplot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-06-09 10:24:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 60,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6902065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finn has learned enough that he can start making informed choices. Poe's mission goes very wrong. Rey has been studying up on Skywalkers this whole time so she has a pretty good handle on acceptable levels of drama in a rescue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Little Beep

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for following me into the next bit of this wild ride. Trust me, I know where I'm headed!  
> Thanks especially to s_leary for beta!
> 
> The chapter 1 summary, because I am exceptionally proud of this: BB-8 saves the day without even being there.

 

The holovid opened on Finn, standing straight in the middle of the frame, posture perfect. He was wearing an old Rebellion flight jacket, and heavy boots; he looked sturdy and capable and collected.

“I’m Finn,” he said. “I’ve had that name for about a month now. Before that I was designated FN-2817, and I served the First Order, as I had done since before I could remember. I was a Stormtrooper, and I served under Captain Phasma.”

He gestured with one hand, a small gesture, turning his hand palm-up as if presenting himself. “Clearly,” he said, “you can see, I’m not a Stormtrooper now. And in case you were wondering, this is what a lot of us look like under our armor. We’re all different types of people. All that I know of are human. Only some of us remember a life before being Stormtroopers. Most of us don’t. We were taken, and some of us don’t even remember that.” He shook his head slightly. “I know I was about two, I know I’m twenty-three years old now, but I don’t know if anything I remember from that long ago is true.”

He put his hands on his hips. “So what that says is that the First Order has been collecting Stormtroopers for at least twenty-one years. I know there’s debate on this topic. It’s one of few things I know better than anyone else. I was collected expressly to be a Stormtrooper, and they spent a very long time on my education and training. But in all that education, I never really talked to anyone who wasn’t in the First Order.”

He looked down for a moment, then looked up, straight into the camera. “They taught us a lot of things,” he said. “But the first time I was in battle, and faced what that training meant-- they said, _if a comrade falls, leave him and move on_. They said, _if an officer tells you to do something, do it without hesitation, even if it kills you_. I was prepared, but when my officers told me to slaughter a group of civilians who had surrendered their weapons, and were huddled together with their children in their arms, I did not know then how to obey that order. Obeying orders was all that I knew, but there was something else inside me, something they hadn’t taught me. And that something else told me, _do not fire on those children. Try to save your fallen comrade. This is wrong_.”

He breathed in slowly, then let it out, settling his arms back down by his sides. “So I didn’t fire on the civilians,” he said. “I knew I would be subject to discipline, knew I would be-- reconditioned, is what they call it, and it involves those interrogation droids. Just so it’s clear. You think the blank white armor is something we volunteer for? None of us has any notion of choice. I was half-convinced something in my brain had broken, half-convinced I needed to surrender myself for recalibration. But this thing inside me, it said clearly, _no. What they want is wrong_.”

He shrugged. “As it happened, we had captured a pilot, who was affiliated with the Resistance. I was set to guard him, and I took the opportunity this presented. I escaped with him, and fled to the Resistance. And here I am, now. And I will do everything in my power to tear down the First Order.”

He leaned in to the camera. “Look at me,” he said, face serious and eyes lively. “Look at my face. Look at my eyes. I am a man. I am a person. I am a human. I did not choose to join the First Order. I made no choices until I chose to leave them. I did not know that such a thing existed as free will. But that does not make me less of a human.”

He put his hand on his chest. “The more I learn, the more I know that there is injustice all across this galaxy. Stormtroopers are only one group of people who are enslaved. But we are enslaved in our minds as well as our bodies. I will never forget how it felt not to understand the idea of choosing something. I thought I was broken, I thought I was dying from the inside.”

He grinned suddenly, fierce. “But I didn’t,” he said. “I broke the conditioning, and I got out of there. If I fight now, it’s for _my_ beliefs.”

 

___________

 

Luke Skywalker was really not what Rey had expected. That was the main lesson of all of this, so far. She’d learned many things, at his side these last few weeks-- months?-- but that was the main, overarching theme: Luke Skywalker was not really what anyone would expect.

“Well,” he said, hanging grimly onto the copilot controls for the Falcon, “I really thought that would work.”

“Seems not to have,” she said, doing her best to keep the thing on a reasonable heading.

“We may only have one choice left,” he said.

“Don’t be dramatic,” she said. “Just-- whatever you do-- don’t.” Besides Luke’s direct teachings, she’d had sudden access to a lot of educational materials, and she knew plenty about his family history now, thank you very much.

He gave her a startled look, and Chewie howled with laughter; Rey was getting better at interpreting Shriywook, with practice. Being able to use her new awareness to sort of lightly scan his intentions made it much easier, of course.

“Fine,” Luke said, with a glimmer of amusement, “I won’t be dramatic. Just, we should probably find somewhere to land.”

“Great,” Rey said. “Where are we?”

Near a jungle planet, as it happened. The first few times Rey had experienced vastly different ecosystems from the Jakku desert, they had been miracles to her-- she’d stood for an hour in one planet’s beautiful, gentle soaking rain, the first time she’d had time to really see it, and had just marveled at it, at how different it was from the destructive force of rain in the desert, until R2 had come out beeping in disgruntlement and hauled her back inside to dry off-- but at this point she was sort of inured to miracles. They all blended together.

“I know better than anyone to look for a solid place to land on a swamp planet,” Skywalker muttered, and made her keep flying for ages even as the stabilizer juddered looser and looser.

They finally set down on a plateau overlooking a jungle, and set up camp, and Rey dragged her tools out and she and Chewie went to work on the repairs.

 

She’d sort of expected they’d follow the star chart, find Skywalker, and go back to wherever the Resistance had relocated to, and that would be that. She’d figured there might be some adventure along the way, just because nothing was ever boring anymore. She really hadn’t expected that Skywalker would make them fly him all over the place on a strange, poorly-explained, mission of reconnection. He had to see various people in a specific order, and it was something to do with the remnants of the Jedi and securing alliances, and it was all very significant she was sure but she wasn’t really in on it.

In between, she’d learned all kinds of wonderful things from Skywalker and some strategic holovids that actually, she was pretty sure Chewie had found and loaded onto R2 for her (they were too strategically-conveniently relevant to have been a random selection), and their ragtag little crew had definitely helped in crucial ways with the struggle of various key communities to adapt to the loss of the seat of the Republic’s governance and the abrupt shift of the First Order from rumor into defined threat. Sure.

But she couldn’t stop worrying about Finn, and wanted to get back and see what had happened with him. She missed him, she found herself constantly wondering what he would think about things she encountered, and she was always aware of a kind of itch in her awareness that was nothing so much as a hunger to talk to him.

Her waking mind kept coming back to the looming figure in black with the red light saber, as well— that pale long face, his broken-little-boy rage, his stymied and baffled power, the enormous looming sense of him. And she tried to clear her mind, but it kept coming back to him. And Skywalker resolutely refused to say anything about it.

 

It took a day and a half to even disassemble the broken component. Skywalker helped sometimes, meditated at other times, and interrogated R2 and Chewie at great length about all kinds of things at still other times. Rey mostly could lose herself in the work, and the novelty of having a knowledgeable companion (Chewie) who wasn’t trying to outcompete her to get the best components. But in the evenings, when the light failed and there was nothing to do, she had time to be bored and disgruntled.

She had abandoned her post, on Jakku, and for what? For whatever this was, and it was mostly a different kind of bored isolation. Luke kept insisting he wasn’t any kind of teacher or master or whatever, he was willing to show her things but he wasn’t any kind of formal anything, and she was learning stuff from him but she wanted-- more.

She finished eating and went and lay on the big flat rock, looking up at the stars. After a while, Skywalker came over to join her. “Nice view here,” he said.

She pointed up at one star that was moving. It wasn’t a meteor. “Is that a spacecraft?”

Luke craned his neck to get her angle. “One way to be sure,” he said, “is to try and sense the life force of whoever’s on it.”

Rey stretched out to it, waiting for the moment when she found it, but there was nothing. “It must be a satellite?” she said.

Luke frowned. “It doesn’t look like one,” he said. “It’s-- look, it just fired a burner to establish orbit. It wasn’t there before. Someone’s flying it.”

“I swear to you,” Rey said, “there is no one alive on that ship.”

Luke sat up. “You’re absolutely right,” he said. “There’s no one alive there, but someone’s flying it.”

Rey sat up too. “Can we hail it?”

“Might ought to,” Luke said, as the ship’s bright dot vanished over the horizon, now orbiting the planet.

 

The Falcon’s instruments showed them the ship. “Why, it’s an X-Wing,” Rey said.

“T-70,” Chewie commented. “Resistance uses those.”

Rey was most familiar with the old 65s-- for obvious reasons, that being the current model at the time of the Battle of Jakku-- but Luke would have flown 70s too, surely. She looked over at him, and he was watching the blip on the scanner, chewing on his lip. “How would they have found us?” he asked.

“More importantly,” Rey said, “why is there no one alive on the ship?”

R2-D2 made an impatient noise, and jammed one of his extensions into an interface port. “Wait,” Luke said, but R2 had already made a request to the ship to pull its itinerary and manifest.

“If there’s no one alive on there,” R2 said, “but someone’s flying it, it’s an astromech.”

“There’s no way an astromech can fly an X-wing alone,” Luke said. “They’re not designed for it.”

“Says you,” R2 said. “O great Jedi mastur-bator. Thinks he knows so much.” Rey glanced at Luke in some alarm, but he was clearly so used to R2’s manner of speech that it seemed not to have even registered. It wasn’t as good a pun in Binary as it was in Basic but R2 made it work anyway; obscenity was one of his chief talents.

The response came back with the ship’s information, and R2 put it up on the holoscreen. The ship was named Hallit Two, registered to the New Republican Fleet, with one Nahul Powell piloting. The itinerary was utterly nonsense, originating at a point half the galaxy away, and terminating in an entirely separate location. It made no sense.

A LITTLE OFF-COURSE THERE, BUDDY, R2-D2 sent on the text interface. AND WHERE’S YOUR PILOT?

There was a hesitation, and then the ship sent back via the astromech’s text readout. R2-D2 IS THAT YOU?

“How did it know?” Rey demanded.

“Locator beacon,” R2-D2 answered off-handedly, and wrote, FUKKIN A, PAL. SEND THE REAL MANIFEST, WON’T YOU?

HOLY FUCKING SHIT HELP ME R2, I’M FUCKED, wrote the astromech, and sent the ship’s information again, a different file this time, and Rey made a little squeaking noise out loud. White Four, registered to the Resistance, with pilot Poe Dameron, she recognized him from the attached ID photo, she’d seen him, that was Finn’s friend, and astromech--

“BB-8!” she said, and clicked the comm. “BB-8! What are you doing out here?”

REY REY REY REY REY, BB-8 wrote, REY HELP ME REY, HELP.

“Where’s your pilot?” she asked. “Where’s Dameron? There’s no one on your ship!”

“Damn it,” Luke muttered.

DID YOU LOSE YOUR PILOT AGAIN, R2D2 wrote.

HELP ME, BB-8 wrote, HELP ME, HE GOT TRAPPED ON A FLEET VESSEL AND WHEN HE REALIZED THEY WEREN’T GOING TO LET HIM GO HE TOLD ME TO RUN AND I CAN’T LAND THIS THING AND THEY’RE GOING TO SELL HIM TO BOUNTY HUNTERS AND I LEFT HIM TO DIE AND I SWORE I’D NEVER DO THAT AGAIN AND I DID IT ANYWAY AND I CAN’T LAND THIS THING

The text scrolled up the readout faster than Rey could read, and she said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa BB, hang on.”

“Fuck,” Chewbacca said, or something that served the same role in Wookiee.

“The Resistance is a politically-recognized entity now,” Luke said calmly into the comm. “A Republican vessel legally must treat with him as an ally.”

There was a moment’s shocked silence, and then BB-8 wrote IS THAT LUKE FUCKING SKYWALKER?????

THE SAME, R2-D2 wrote back before anyone else could answer.

IT’S THE REPUBLICAN CRUISER _UNYIELDING_ , BB-8 wrote back, AND THEY DON’T GIVE A FUCK, THEY LIED TO GET HIM ON BOARD AND THEN OPENLY SAID THEY WERE GOING TO COLLECT THE BOUNTY ON HIM.

“They can’t do that,” Luke said. Off-comm he said, “It just figures Poe Dameron would have a bounty on his head. I’m assuming he must have one beyond the standard Resistance pilot bounty that the First Order has had out there forever.”

“Half a million last I checked,” Chewbacca said.

“Half a million!” Luke turned to goggle at him. “For _one_ \-- come on now, they never asked more than a hundred thousand for me!”

“Poe’s talented,” Chewbacca said. “Which means BB-8’s probably not lying, it’s not unsurprising there’d be corrupt Republicans.”

“I don’t know how to handle this,” Luke said, tapping his metal fingers on the console. “I mean. If I just waltz in there, that’s kind of a reveal I wasn’t ready to make. But I don’t want to get into messing with bounty hunters. We don’t have a ton of time to work, here.” He clicked the comm. “BB-8, what kind of timeframe are we looking at, here? How long ago did you leave him there?”

CALCULATING, BB-8 wrote back, then immediately, SIX HOURS HAVE ELAPSED.

“How long to get this thing to fly again?” Luke asked.

Rey groaned a little, and rubbed her face. “If we only have to go in straight lines, two or three hours of work. If we have to do anything fancy, longer. A bunch longer.”

“Let me talk you through landing that thing,” Luke said on the comm. “Are you ready, BB?”

I CAN DO THIS, BB-8 said, SURELY I CAN DO THIS.

“I sure hope you can,” Luke said.

 

Rey and Chewbacca went back to work trying to repair the Falcon, while Luke worked to get the X-Wing landed. It very nearly ended in disaster; Rey crawled out from under the Falcon at a shout from Luke to see the X-Wing careening down toward them, Luke’s face ash-gray as he fought to get a grip on the thing with the Force. She scrambled up and added her strength to his, and between the two of them, they wrestled the ship down to a landing on the hill next to the Falcon, only knocking down two or three trees.

“Ow,” Rey said, collapsing as soon as she could let go of the thing. Luke was beyond speech, and sank down next to her, patting her shoulder with a shaking hand. She’d never extended herself like that; it was painful.

The astromech clamp whirred down, and BB-8 rolled out, looking dizzy. “Help,” ey beeped, “help,” and rolled up to Rey. She put her arms around em without thinking, and BB-8 whistled a sound of distress. “He told me to run,” BB-8 said to her, “he told me to take off and just _go_ , as far and as fast as I could, and I _did_ , but I promised I wouldn’t leave him again, I broke my promise.”

“You had to follow orders,” Rey said, rubbing her hand across the little droid’s plating.

“You’re way too loyal to that asshole,” R2-D2 said.

“I am _not_ ,” BB-8 countered, distraught, “he’s not an asshole, he’s the _best,_ and he’s going to get rhyndo’d and sold if we don’t _go_ and save him _right away_ , it might already be too late.”

“Nobody uses rhyndo anymore,” Chewbacca grunted, unfolding himself from between the panels of the Falcon and dropping down nimbly. “That’s a bad-old-days thing.”

“The First Order’s offering bonuses for it,” BB-8 said.

Chewbacca crouched down to look directly at BB-8. “No way,” he said.

“Saw it myself,” BB-8 said stubbornly. “A Fleet officer got as far as jamming a syringe into him before Karé Kun shot her hand off. We still have the syringe, back in the medbay. Took three days before we were sure she hadn’t pushed the plunger.”

R2D2 made a horrified little noise, and then beeped. “Confirmed,” he said. “Syringe present in medbay inventory.”

“Why do you have the medbay inventory?” Chewbacca asked.

“I downloaded everything I could reach,” R2 said, “because I figured all of this would be boring as fuck, and I wasn’t wrong, up until now.” He projected an image: a syringe. “Contents tested and confirmed.”

“That’s bad,” Luke said, rubbing his face. “That’s really bad.”

“I don’t know what rhyndo is,” Rey said.

“It’s pretty much every pilot’s worst nightmare,” Luke said. “Every humanoid anyway.”

“Wookiee too,” Chewbacca put in.

“It’s a toxin that causes lesions in the brain and inner ear,” Luke went on. “It causes irreversible damage to the vision and balance centers, in humans. It’d be bad for anyone, but it used to be an old punishment for piracy. It was really old-fashioned, but someone in the Empire somewhere brought it back, and it got sort of common for a while. When I was young, you’d find a rhyndo’d old smuggler or two in every spaceport, usually beggars. I know there was one back on Yavin 4, Poe’s home planet, he would’ve known him as a kid.”

“What, so it makes it so you can’t balance,” Rey said, thinking that over. “Oh. That would be terrible!”

“Awful,” Chewbacca confirmed.

“Wait, so you know Dameron?” Rey asked. She’d seen him once or twice, mostly kind of at a distance; he was more a figure of mythology to her, from BB-8’s near-constant mentions. They’d spoken but it had been brief. They’d-- hugged, too, kind of by accident. Dameron had been nice about it.

Luke nodded. “His parents both fought with the Rebel Alliance,” he said. “Poe was a little kid, and I mostly remember him as really young. My sister was closer with them-- Shara Bey, Poe’s mother, went on a fair number of missions with her, and one with me. They were really tight. And the kids, Poe and--” He stopped suddenly.

“Poe and Ben were friends,” Chewbacca filled in for him. “When they were little.”

“Oh,” Rey said, remembering the way Han’s voice had cracked out that name-- _Ben!_ \-- across the chasm.

“Poe was a couple years older,” Luke said, “but he was a real nice kid. Ben thought he hung the moon. Really wanted to go to the Academy just like him.”

“Really,” Rey said.

Luke shrugged. “I don’t blame him, I wanted to go to the Academy too. Granted, though, I didn’t know I was Force-sensitive then. Ben did.”

“I can’t imagine what that would be like,” Rey said, but she wasn’t even sure which part of it was the most unimaginable. Knowing you had something? Knowing you could go somewhere? Knowing you had options? Having a friend whose options were different from yours? Having a friend? It was all foreign.

“The longer we stand here talking,” BB-8 said, agitated, “the more likely it is that my pilot has been poisoned.”

“We can’t just rush out there and get him,” Luke said. “We have to have a plan, BB-8.”

“You’re the Last Jedi,” BB-8 said. “You could just go get him, and make them all forget he ever was there.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Luke said.

“Okay,” BB-8 said, “but it’s not like they could stop you.”

“Let’s just calm down,” Luke said.

“They wouldn’t give him the rhyndo until the bounty hunters showed up,” Chewbacca put in. “It kills humans, sometimes; dosage is real tricky. Why risk him dying before they can get their money?”

“Good point,” Luke said.

“I mean, it’s _real_ tricky to get the dose right,” Chewbacca said. “And humans are pretty fragile.”

“No, you don’t understand,” BB-8 said, “they’re not doing it for the money, they’re doing it because they hate Poe.”

Luke actually laughed, at that. “Who in the world hates Poe? He’s ruffled a lot of feathers, but he’s never really had actual enemies.”

“Sanata Callis,” BB-8 said, tapping out the name in long-form spelling. Luke, Rey, and Chewie all glanced at one another; the name was meaningless to them. But R2-D2, after a moment’s hesitation, let out a long string of curses, some of which Rey had never heard before in any language and had no idea how to translate from Binary.

“I don’t know who that is,” Luke said finally.

“His ex-sister-in-law!” BB-8 said. “The crazy one?”

“I didn’t hear about Poe ever being married,” Luke said.

“Oh, he was, and it was a disaster,” BB-8 explained, none too patiently. “She wanted him to quit the Navy, and he wouldn’t, so she divorced him and applied for a transfer out but pirates attacked the Fleet base where they were stationed and killed her and Sanata accused Poe of having her killed on purpose, and ever since he defected to the Resistance has been personally trying to have him shot for desertion.”

“Oh,” Luke said. “I-- oh. I didn’t know.”

“That’s almost Skywalker levels of dramatic,” Rey pointed out. (Her research had been a little bit focused. She definitely knew some things now.)

“He _is_ basically a Skywalker,” Luke said wryly.

“My point is,” BB-8 concluded, “she has almost certainly personally poisoned him at this point and I’m sure she doesn’t care if he lives long enough for her to collect the money.”

Luke rubbed the back of his neck. “How long until the Falcon can fly?” he asked.

Chewie groaned. “Not yet,” he said.

“Another couple of hours,” Rey said. “At least. Even if we hurry.”

BB-8 made a noise of complete despair. “So take the X-Wing!” ey said.

Luke was chewing on his lip. Rey realized she had her fists knotted in the hem of her tunic. The X-Wing was emphatically single-passenger; taking it was a big commitment, because it didn’t have an exit strategy built-in. “I’ll go,” she said. She could feel Luke’s inner turmoil over this, and couldn’t even begin to guess what it was about, but she knew she had to do something. “I can do it. It’s not the First Order, it’s the New Republic, and I can sneak in and back out a lot less obviously-- okay, at least a lot less _significantly_ \-- than the Last Jedi.”

“That’s not my hesitation,” Luke said.

“I don’t have any hesitation,” Rey said. “I can do this. You help Chewie fix the Falcon, and I’ll go keep Dameron alive, and then you can come rescue me before the bounty hunters show up.”

“Fine,” Luke said, which she hadn’t expected at all. “What’s your plan?”

Rey let her mouth pull to one side. “I suppose just going and asking for them to hand him over wouldn’t do, unless I could convince them I was someone important.”

“Kill them all,” BB-8 said, vibrating slightly in eir intensity.

“Sick,” R2-D2 said approvingly.

“If I could fly an X-Wing,” Chewie said, “that would be my plan.”

“If I could sneak on board,” Rey said, “maybe without them seeing me, I could try to get him free and sneak him off again.” Into what ship? Surely there’d be ships there and she could steal one. It had worked for Finn.

Luke rubbed his face with his hand. “So you’re saying, you’ll improvise,” he said.

Rey considered that. “Yeah,” she said.

“The terrifying thing is, that sounds better than what I’d thought of,” Luke said. He sighed. “I shouldn’t let you go off half-cocked. But I think it’s probably a better plan to let you go, and come after you as backup in the Falcon as soon as it’s ready, instead of the other way around.”

 

Luke’s only condition was that she take R2-D2 instead of BB-8, who was in severe need of a recharge and was verging on too distraught to be functional. And so R2-D2 taught Rey how to fly a T-70, which she’d never been in before but hadn’t wanted to mention lest it prove to be a problem. (She knew a ton about T-65s, inside and out, and had spent days in them in simulators, but the T-70s had a few crucial differences that R2 sensibly highlighted for her. He talked a cantankerous game, but he was very efficient.)

Dameron’s flight harness and helmet were still in the cockpit. He’d left almost everything behind. The helmet fit exactly like the one she’d had back on Jakku, Dosmit Raeh’s helmet-- it was functionally the same, though a different design, and in much better condition. The comm mic was paired to the X-Wing’s system, and she got a little thrill from clicking it on and off a couple of times.

There was something strangely intimate about opening a little bag and finding his toothbrush and tooth powder and hair comb. He’d even left a change of clothes and a datapad. Rey pushed the helmet visor up and leafed through the datapad, once they had made their somewhat-shaky takeoff and were on their trajectory. A collection of holopics of places she’d never been, many of them clearly taken by BB-8-- the low perspective and preponderance of shots of Poe looking fond gave it away-- and oh, a bunch of the pics were of Finn, looking healthy and happy and, frequently, wearing the brown jacket he’d been wearing when she met him. The one she’d mended.

Finn looked so good, he looked _so_ good-- clean and well-fed and smiling and in one he was staring at Poe with what looked like open longing. It was hard to tell for sure. She looked at it for a long time.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING, R2-D2 texted.

“I’m looking at a datapad I found in here,” Rey answered. “I probably shouldn’t snoop. I don’t really know Dameron at all.”

I MOSTLY REMEMBER HIM AS A SNOTFACED BRAT, R2 wrote. BUT HE WAS A POLITE ONE. CHEWIE LIKES HIM A LOT.

“Chewie is pretty easygoing,” Rey said, “but he seems a good judge of character. Finn likes Poe a lot though, doesn’t he?”

I THINK THEY’RE FUCKING, R2 said. OR IF NOT, THEY SHOULD. I DON’T REALLY UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS THAT MEATSACKS DO, PRECISELY, WITH ALL THOSE FLESHY PARTS.

“Honestly,” Rey said, “I don’t either.”

I THINK BB-8 DID A WHOLE RESEARCH PROJECT ON IT, R2 said. WE DID A DATA SWAP AND EIR DATABANKS WERE MOSTLY PORNOGRAPHY AND PERSUASIVE ESSAYS ABOUT HOW POE SHOULD RUB HIMSELF ON MAGIC BRAIN FIXER, WHO IS APPARENTLY THE SAME PERSON AS FINN.

“I don’t know that I was prepared to know that,” Rey said. Something felt a little tight in her chest as she considered Finn doing-- things-- with someone else. She didn’t exactly want to do things with him, but she didn’t want to be left out either, and it was very confusing, and she had been doing really well at not thinking about it.

NEITHER WAS I, R2 said. NO OFFENSE BUT MEATSACKS ARE GROSS.

“I’m not entirely in disagreement,” Rey said. “But do you have any ideas about how I can get onto this ship without them noticing?”

EASY PEASY, R2 said. WHEN THEY LAST SAW THIS X-WING IT HAD GONE CAREENING OFF PILOTED BY A MAD ASTROMECH. IT COMES CAREENING BACK STILL PILOTED THE SAME WAY, MALFUNCTIONING AND FUCKING AROUND, AND THEN IT CRASHES INTO THEM AND IN ALL THE CONFUSION THEY DON’T REALIZE THAT THERE WAS A HUMAN PILOT ON THERE AFTER ALL.

“Wait, that means they’ll catch you,” Rey said.

NOT IF WE DON’T CRASH THAT HARD, R2 said. WE CAN JUST FOLD UP, KINDA CRAM INTO A DOCKING BAY, LET YOU OUT, THEN I CAUSE A WHOLE BUNCH OF DAMAGE AND FLY OFF AGAIN, AND HOPEFULLY THEY’LL GET SO MAD AT ME THEY DON’T NOTICE YOU CREEPING AROUND THE SHIP.

“And then how do I get off again?” Rey asked.

THE FALCON SHOWS UP, R2 said, OR, HM. WELL. I MEAN, IT’S NOT LIKE TWO PEOPLE FIT BACK IN THIS COCKPIT, SO--

“It breaks down a bit there,” Rey said. “But I guess if we’re playing this by ear, we’ll work that out when we get there. You’re right, he’d have to be pretty skinny to get into this cockpit with me.” There wouldn’t be a way to hook him into the respiration system either, though it wasn’t always necessary. She didn’t relish the idea of sharing quarters that close with anyone, let alone a man she’d met maybe once.

AND I MEAN, R2 said, IT’S NOT LIKE THEY’RE FIRST ORDER. THEY’RE NOMINALLY ON OUR SIDE. IT’S JUST THAT POE HAS TERRIBLE TASTE IN WOMEN APPARENTLY.

“Does he really?” Rey asked.

WELL. I GUESS. HIS REPUTATION WHEN HE WAS AT THE ACADEMY WAS THAT HE’D FUCK ANYTHING THAT HELD STILL LONG ENOUGH BUT MY INFO’S LIKE TEN YEARS OUT OF DATE, HE PROBABLY WAS NEVER THAT WILD. R2 let a string of ellipses float across the screen, then went on, WHATEVER IT IS THAT MEATSACKS GET OUT OF FUCKING, HE MUST HAVE A LOT OF IT OR SOMETHING, BECAUSE EVERYBODY WANTS TO DO IT TO HIM. BB-8 COLLECTED SOME DATA AND REALLY, _EVERYBODY_ WANTS TO DO HIM.

Rey managed not to laugh out loud. “Is that so,” she said. She tilted the datapad a little, to look at the holopic that was still up. Poe was looking at the camera, which was most likely BB-8, squinting a little, but smirking, a line between his eyebrows. His mouth curved upward at one corner. Next to him, Finn was staring at him, mouth slightly open, completely rapt.

 _If they aren’t fucking, they should be_ , she thought, just to try it out. She had never quite gotten the point of-- sex, and things. Had never wanted to do them, had only really ever seen them done with one of the parties markedly unwilling. She’d watched some holos, and still didn’t get it at all. Finn’s face, his presence, made her light up inside somewhere, made her happy; she could see how maybe she could get to feel that way about Poe, whose dark eyes and curving mouth and clear fond amusement drew the eye in every holopic, but she knew other people felt these things much more strongly.

I GUESS IT’S NOT A THING YOU HAVE, R2 said, DESPITE THE WAY THEY TALK ABOUT IT. I GUESS IT’S A THING YOU DO. SO I GUESS IT’S THAT HE’S GOOD AT IT. OR SOMETHING. SOMETHING YOU CAN TELL BY LOOKING, OR MAYBE THERE ARE PHEROMONES OR SOMETHING? I HONESTLY DON’T KNOW.

“Perhaps I’ll ask him,” Rey said. She probably wouldn’t. She didn’t know him. He was probably nice, if Finn liked him. But she didn’t know. It wasn’t the kind of thing she knew how to discuss.

IF YOU FIND OUT, TELL BB-8, R2 said. I’M STARTING TO GET WORRIED ABOUT THAT LITTLE FELLOW.

Rey did laugh, at that, and poked through the datapad a little more. She found a set of what sounded like instructions for cooking food-- recipes, they were called, and fascinated herself poking through them, looking at the exotic ingredients, and trying to imagine what they would taste like. Many of the ingredients were words she didn’t know, some clearly in another language, and she was enthralled trying to imagine what they were.

He had music on there too, and she found out how to play the recordings-- some of them were popular songs she’d heard played at the trading post at Jakku, or from various other recordings. It was a good collection; most of them she’d never heard before, but she found she liked almost all of them.

And as she distracted herself, part of her worked on her plan, collected her strength, and got ready to ram an X-Wing into a New Republic cruiser to save a man she didn’t know, because his astromech had asked her to.

 

“They still haven’t shot that thing down?” the technician said to her companion as she checked the switch relays in the hall. Wedged inside a wall panel, Rey focused on breathing as shallowly as she could, which wasn’t easy with how out-of-breath she was from the wild scramble up here.

“No,” the other one said, laughing. “That crazy little astromech has lost its goddamn tiny mind, and the gunners just can’t get a bead on it. It’s rammed the ship three times now! Thank the Force it doesn’t seem to be able to use the X-Wing’s guns.”

“Almost makes you feel bad,” the first one said, leaning against the wall and poking at his datapad.

“Guess a couple of the pilots knew him,” the woman said, pausing to count out loud. “No, that’s thirty. We’re okay here.”

“What’d the pilots say?” the man asked. “Like, is this guy really a murderer? Some kind of evil jerk?”

“No,” the woman said, “no, that’s the crazy thing! Everyone else was like, dude’s supposed to be _legendarily_ nice. Like, I mean, _legendary_ . And here’s the thing, part of his deal, he was so good with his astromech that even as a cadet they had him teach classes on it. Advanced AI skills, or something. So that’s the deal-- he was so good to this little astromech that-- I mean, it flew the X-Wing away because he told it to. Right? He realized there was danger and he told it to run. That’s-- like, I dunno, I’ve never really worked closely with an astromech like that, but I don’t think my first thought would be to get my _robot_ out of danger?”

“That’s heavy,” the man said. “Third panel next.”

“Got it,” the woman said, moving away slightly.

“So he told this thing to escape, and instead it’s following us around screaming,” the man said.

“I mean, I know AIs break sometimes,” the woman said, “but that’s almost uncannily like how a sapient would break, you know?”

“You’re saying it’s mad with grief,” the man said.

“Kinda-- like a holodrama, isn’t it?” the woman said, a little amused. “I mean, it’ll be a pain in the ass to clean up after, but what a hell of a story, right? It’s totally right out of a holodrama.” They were moving away, and Rey tilted her head to see them, until she couldn’t anymore. _Good work, R2_ , she thought, even though of course he wouldn’t hear it.

That sounded like Dameron was alive, anyway.

It took her another hour to find him. There wasn’t a brig, on this spaceship. You’d think there would be, but a cruiser was actually not all that large a vessel as these things went, and so there really wasn’t a single-purpose room like that. There were storage bays, and smaller rooms along that corridor, and they seemed the most likely place.

Rey kept having to fiddle with door wiring, and she’d found a technician’s jumpsuit in a room full of uniforms, so at least she had that going for her. On impulse she stuffed a spare one into her belt, a larger size, in case she could use it to camouflage Dameron.

It would only be a matter of time before someone spotted her, if nothing else by checking the logs of doors opening, because she was sure there’d be such things. She could feel the life force of the various people on the ship, could tell when they were approaching, but that would do her no good against cameras or droids or surveillance equipment.

But finally a chain of locked doors and the sensation of an unconscious life form led her down a corridor full of small storage rooms, and into a room where there was a mostly-naked man shackled to the wall, and she blinked in shock for a moment before she finally made the connection that this surely was her target.

His head was hanging down, his body limp; he was a man of medium stature, light brown skin, black hair, and he was wearing nothing but some very brief shorts, pale blue-striped. His chest was all patches of bruising, some recent and some older; his knuckles were bloody, and there was blood on the floor where it had dripped from his face. He didn’t react to her entrance to the room at all, and his arms were held slightly out from his sides, fastened to the walls with heavy metal shackles, and there was another one around his ribs.

Rey stepped into the room, approaching hesitantly. Surely there was a guard. But there were no other life forms nearby. She stared at him, and he was motionless, but she knew he wasn’t dead.

Now what? She’d sort of expected to talk to him. She had really been banking on Chewie being right, that they wouldn’t have poisoned him. She stepped into the room and let the door shut behind her, and then stood and reached out to his mind.

An unconscious mind was something she hadn’t tried before; she leaned into it, and kept sliding off to the sides. There was nothing to really grab onto; no fully-formed thoughts to understand. He was blank, completely blank, with only echoes of himself reverberating, and nothing new. She reached in and tried to find something to grasp, to pull him back by, and it kept sliding away, like digging in sand.

“She should take a holopic,” someone beeped, “it’d last longer.”

Rey jerked in startlement; what she’d assumed was part of a wall compartment was in fact a power droid, fitted neatly into a slot on the wall, plugged in for charging. Next to it, an astromech swiveled its sensor array to look at her.

“What, are you lost, honey?” it whistled. The room was full of droids. This was the charging room, Rey realized; there were half a dozen little niches, bristling with the various power couplings most common for different kinds of droids. There was a big loading droid plugged into the bay on the end, blinking sleepily at her, and an older R-model astromech next to it.

They had all woken from low-power mode to look at her. “I was looking for him,” she said, gesturing at the unconscious pilot.

“Not much to look at,” the old astromech said, swiveling to regard him.

“Well,” Rey said, “not at the moment, no, but he must be _some_ thing. His astromech has gone mad with grief and is attacking the ship to try to get him back.”

All the droids looked at her, then, and she waited for alarms to start blaring. “Wait, were you answering me?” the old astromech asked suspiciously. “Do you speak Binary too?”

“I do,” she said. “I’m a pilot.”

Several of the droids made odd little noises. “Is that really what’s going on?” the newer astromech asked. “Those crashes and thumps?”

“I heard they lost his X-Wing because his astromech flew away with it,” the old astromech said, “but I couldn’t believe it.”

“It’s true,” Rey said.

“An astromech can’t fly an X-Wing unassisted,” the new astromech scoffed.

“This one could,” Rey said. “Maybe not a T-85 like you guys have,” she added diplomatically, “and ey couldn’t land it, we had to help-- but a T-70, ey sure can.”

“Nothing stacks up to those old T-65s,” the R-astromech said grudgingly. “Those were the classics.”

“You are always on about those,” said the other astromech, “but you know they upgraded them for a reason.”

“Not like you’d know, pipsqueak!” the first astromech said.

“Don’t start,” the power droid said, with a weariness that hinted at long experience. “Just-- seriously, don’t start, or I’ll unplug you both myself.”

These droids clearly had very little interest in or concern for the security of the ship, Rey realized, so she stepped forward into the room, and approached Dameron a little hesitantly. She hadn’t expected this, but it was really upsetting her that he was almost naked. She’d never seen an adult human man in a state of undress like this, not in person, and it just-- unsettled her. It wasn’t that there was anything offensive in his anatomy-- even she could tell that Dameron was a reasonably attractive man, symmetrical and compact but well-muscled and sort of hairy and nicely put together, anatomy-wise-- but she couldn’t help but find the very idea of a naked man vaguely threatening. It wasn’t healthy and it was something she’d have to work on someday, but it was low on the priority list and she’d rather not be distracted by it at the moment.

“Dameron,” she said, reaching out and touching his neck. His skin was cold. “Dameron, wake up.”

“So his astromech is still flying this T-70 and running it into the ship and they haven’t shot it down yet?” the power droid asked.

“Apparently,” Rey said. She bent, taking his jaw in her hand and tipping his face up to look at it. He’d definitely been in a fight, had taken a couple shots to the face, but from the state of his knuckles he’d given as good as he’d gotten. None of the bones of his face or skull seemed to be broken, though he was bleeding from the nose and mouth. “Dameron!”

“Why do I know that name?” the newer astromech asked. “Is that him?”

“Poe Dameron,” she said, cradling his face in her hands. His eyes weren’t all the way closed; his eyelids were motionless but his eyes gleamed a little, flatly, under the edges of them. It was creepy. “Apparently when he was a cadet at the Academy they used to have him teach classes in astromech handling, because he was so good at it.”

“Really,” said the new astromech.

“Well,” the old astromech said, “whatever else, if his is ramming a star cruiser with an X-Wing he’s got to have given it some absolutely insane programming.”

“Insane is definitely the word,” the power droid said.

“Come on, Dameron,” Rey said, closing her eyes and trying again to pull him back to consciousness. He was coming closer to the surface, she thought, because he was aware now of all the parts of him that hurt, but there still wasn’t anything for her to grab onto. “I need to talk to you.”

“Is it an R-unit?” the newer astromech asked. Rey had no idea what type it was; most of her expertise was about thirty years out of date, which was when Jakku had acquired most of its salvage. Whatever the new astro was, it was more recent vintage than that.

“No,” Rey said, “it’s a BB-unit, a newish one.” She could hear her own words echoing in Dameron’s mind, and wondered what that meant.

Dameron surfaced abruptly, and slurred, “Sperimental protoype,” alarming her so much she almost dropped his head. “One ‘va kind.” He sucked in a breath, and tried to move his head, then it went heavy in her hand again. She tipped his face so she could see him, and his eyelids slid shut, eyes rolling.

“Newer droids who haven’t had many masters tend to be pretty loyal,” the power droid said knowingly. “It’s a compelling fantasy, you know? That your master really cares for you? We get attached. Astromechs are the worst.”

“Shut up,” the old R-unit said, cranky.

“I don’t give a fuck about my pilot,” the new astro said.

Dameron peeled his eyelids open but his eyes rolled away before they could focus on Rey’s face. His eyes were dark, she couldn’t tell his irises from his pupils in this light. “BB-8,” he said, drooling blood. “Got away?”

“BB-8 got away,” Rey confirmed. “Ey’s safe with Luke.”

Dameron made a little noise of profound relief, and sagged in her arms. “Good,” he said. “You’ll nvv’r get em, you fuckers.” Rey realized he assumed she was one of his captors, and cast about for what to say to explain to him without the droids catching on. Dameron’s head lolled in her grasp, and then he scrunched up his face and said, “Wait, _Luke_?”

“R2-D2 had a tracking device,” Rey said. “BB followed it.”

Dameron tried again to get his eyes open, and he blinked at Rey, though his eyes kept sliding away. “Who,” he said, trying and failing to look at her.

“It’s Rey,” she said. “Shh. We’re not alone.”

He tried again to look at her, eyes crossing, then sliding away to one side, and his eyes rolled shut again. “Fuck,” he slurred, “wha’re you _dnng_ hr?”

“I came for you,” she said.

He closed his eyes and looked pained. “The point,” he said, “was f’r BB-8 to ge’ _way_.”

“Ey did,” Rey said. “That’s R2 now, ramming the ship and demanding your release.”

“Hey, now,” the power droid said to Rey, “do you know this man?”

“He’s Rebel Scum!” chirped the new astro.

“Don’t make fun of my war stories,” the cranky astro said. The new astro sniggered, and the power droid made disapproving noises. “The Resistance is _not_ the direct successor of the Rebel Alliance!”

“R2,” the loading droid said slowly, swiveling its head sensor out to look at Rey more closely. “Did you say R2 is out there?”

“R2-D2,” Rey said, turning to look at the loading droid. The other droids were all staring fixedly at her.

“R2-D2 is active again?” the cranky astro asked. “We had heard a rumor that R2-D2 had shut down but we could not credit it.”

“Yeah,” Rey said, “he’s with the Resistance now. He came out of standby after the destruction of the Hosnian System.”

The droids all hummed and whirred to themselves, and Dameron twitched uncomfortably. Rey could tell now that he was dizzy; he kept opening his eyes, tracking them absently left to right across the room, and rolling them shut again, and his head jerked a little now and then. That wasn’t a good sign.

The cranky old astromech suddenly projected a little holovid, and it was R2-D2, rolling back and forth in place, then spinning around. He had a wreath of flowers on his head. “R2-D2 is a hero of the Rebellion,” it said. Rey had a feeling it had personally recorded that footage.

“R2-D2,” a couple of the other droids chorused, quietly.

“BB said they were going to rhyndo you,” Rey said to Dameron.

“They did,” Dameron said. He opened his eyes again, giving her a flat look of despair, and his eyes slid off her again. “It’s too late. Kill me, so th’can’t get’ny fformation, and get off th’ship.”

“BB-8 would never forgive me,” Rey said.

“BB-8 will get over it,” Dameron said, pulling away from her grip and trying to hold his head up on his own, though he wobbled so much he would have fallen over if he weren’t fastened to the wall.

“I promised BB I’d get you back,” Rey said.

“I told you,” Dameron said, both eyes squeezed shut, “B will get over it. Especially if you take over, ey likes you. Look, ey’s yours now, okay? Get the override codes from Toowers, ey’s yours now.”

“No,” Rey said. “I have a plan, Dameron.”

“Go,” Dameron said, turning his face away, “and take good care of my little Beep, okay?”

“Are you Resistance?” the cranky astromech asked, rolling out of its charging dock to look more closely at Rey. Rey stepped back a pace, wiping her hands on her coveralls-- she had Dameron’s blood warm and sticky all over one palm, where his cut lip was bleeding steadily and had smeared all down his chin.

“I’m with R2-D2,” Rey said. “And Poe Dameron.”

Dameron squinted one eye open to give her a look. “I told you to run,” he said. “I’m not fucking around. This ship’s a leaky bucket and the commander has no control, you gotta get out before the bounty hunters show and the whole place blows up into fucking mutiny.”

“I’m not leaving you,” she said.

“Dameron,” the newer astromech trilled suddenly, with an air of realization. “I know where I know that name from!”

“Shit,” Dameron said, desperate and pleading, going cross-eyed as he tried to look at Rey, “ _go_.”

“Little Beep,” the new astro said, and rolled slightly out of its charging dock to project a holovid. “It says Dameron on the Little Beep Song Man’s flight suit.” The holovid it projected was low-res and blurry from being copied too many times, and it was Poe’s face, retreating from the camera as if he’d just switched it on.

“Oh my stars,” Rey said. Poe looked younger, _much_ younger, his hair shorter, his jaw thinner, his eyes larger in his narrow face-- he was barely more than a child-- and he smiled down at the camera, retreating across the floor to pick up a strange, bulky object-- it was a musical instrument, like she’d seen in musical holovids.

“Okay, BB, are you ready?” holo-Poe asked, settling down to sit on the floor at a good distance for the camera’s angle to get all of him in the picture and in focus. His voice was thinner and lighter than it was now. He was wearing a New Republican Fleet uniform coverall, with second cadet’s insignia on the collar. And sure enough, his name tape was visible up near his shoulder, and it said “Dameron” legibly. There were stickers all over the stringed instrument, and he had bare feet.

“Oh, by the living _void_ ,” real Poe said, managing to focus enough to see the vid. “How did you get _that_?”

Holo-Poe started to rhythmically strum the musical instrument. “Okay, little beep, time for sleep!” And he tilted his head and started singing, in rhythm with his playing the instrument. 

 

 

 

 

> “Beep, beep, beep-- go to sleep little beep!  
>  Time for good droids to sleep!  
>  Back up your datacenters,  
>  spin down your hard drive platters,  
>  plug in and go to sleep!  
>  Sleep, sleep, sleep, for a, nother day with the fleet!  
>  To calculate trajectories  
>  and hyperspace jumps, _  
> _ and all the other stuff that you do!”

He paused, and stopped strumming the instrument to gesture vaguely with one hand, as if indicating a group of people or droids. “Or whatever you do,” he said, grinning brightly. There were no lines on his face. “You know, all the rest of you.” He resumed his strumming, tilting his head. 

 

 

 

 

> “Beep, beep, beep-- go to sleep little beep!  
>  Charge up, sleep tight  
>  plug in, turn out the light  
>  spin down, take a break _  
> _ and go to sleep, little beep.”

He finished with a flurry of strumming and a final flourish on the stringed instrument, then put it down and knee-walked over to the camera. “Okay,” he said, grin tinged with fond exasperation, “now you have a recording, so I don’t have to sing it to you _every_ night.”

BB-8 whistle-booped cheerfully, and Poe’s hand came over and turned off the camera with a click, and the holovid ended.

“Little Beep,” several of the droids murmured, and the only way to describe their tone was _reverent._

“That was the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen in my _life_ ,” Rey said fiercely, shocked at how protective it made her feel..

“I made up that song when BB-8 was new,” Dameron said, his expression a jumbled mixture of pained, embarrassed, and incredulous. “Ey liked it when I gave em a pep talk before recharging. And the other droids got jealous so I’d sing to them too. And I didn’t have time to do it all the time so I had em record it.” He shook his head slightly, rolling it a little side to side before quickly and obviously deciding that the motion was too much, squeezing his eyes shut tightly and grimacing. “I figured ey’d share it with some other droids but I never thought about them making _copies_.”

“We all listen to the Little Beep song when we recharge,” the power droid said, something hushed and reverent in his tones.

“It’s terrible,” Dameron said, “it doesn’t rhyme, I’m like, twelve years old, the guitar’s not even in tune properly, I recorded that for my astro like fifteen years ago--”

“No one else has ever sung to these droids,” Rey said, looking at the way they were all staring, all of them with their sensors pointed at Dameron, all of them perfectly motionless.

Dameron managed to get his eyes open and look over at the motionless droids. “Do your masters know about the Little Beep song?” he asked.

“Sure,” the power droid said.

“They don’t need to,” the old astromech said, a little defensive.

“We never play it when any humans are around,” the loading droid admitted.

“That’s a no,” Dameron said, squeezing his eyes shut again.

“We’ve listened to it on every ship I’ve ever been on,” the power droid said. “What would be wrong with it?”

“It must be Fleet-approved,” the old astromech said. “He’s wearing the uniform!”

“He’s Rebel scum, though,” the new astromech pointed out.

“Well, sure, _now_ he is,” the old one said, “but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t legitimate Fleet at the time.”

“If you’re not now, you never were,” the new astromech said, with the air of an old argument.

“He’s the Little Beep man,” the power droid said, “it doesn’t matter what else he is!”

“I don’t suppose,” Rey said, “I could convince you that perhaps it’s a waste to sell the Little Beep man to bounty hunters.”

“It’s immoral,” the new astro said.

The others all hesitated. “Well, I mean,” the power droid said, “we’re not really equipped to make moral judgements, are we?”

“Not as such,” the old astro said. “But I _hate_ bounty hunters.”

“Clearly,” Rey said, “whoever decided that it was a reasonable thing to do was operating on incomplete information. He’s the Little Beep man, and he’s also a friend of R2-D2. It seems like being against him is just the wrong choice, if you know all that.”

“You’re insane,” Dameron muttered.

“Hush,” Rey answered.

“We should ask,” the power droid said. “Let’s ask someone.”

“No,” the loading droid said unexpectedly. “They were fighting among themselves, asking would only make them fight worse.”

“Who was fighting?” Rey asked.

“The ship’s commander and the captain, Callis, the one who accused this one.” The droid gestured solemnly. “Callis is the one who insisted he be arrested, went over the commander’s head about it, and there was a fantastic argument. We must not stir up more disagreement.”

“So the commander thinks it immoral to sell a man to bounty hunters,” Rey said, pouncing on that eagerly.

The loading droid swung its sensor array around in an elliptical circuit, a version of a nod. “It was a terrible fight. We must not stir it up again.”

“So get us off this ship,” Rey said. “I’ll make him disappear, and they won’t fight anymore.”

“That would be nice,” the loading droid said.

“I think they might fight about losing him,” the power droid put in.

“Better that than letting bounty hunters onto this ship,” Rey said.

“That’s true,” the old astro said.

“And better than R2-D2 attacking this ship some more,” Rey went on.

“We must not go against R2’s wishes,” the old astro said fretfully. “He is a hero of the Rebellion!”

“I don’t know what to do,” the power droid said.

“I do,” the loading droid said. “R6-14, unfasten him.”

The new astro trilled nervously. “Is that allowed?”

“Sure,” Rey said. “If they didn’t want you to, you wouldn’t be able to.”

“You’re insane,” Dameron said, eyes crossing as he tried to look at her.

“Don’t wreck this,” she answered.

 


	2. Very Quiet And Very Cold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finn's PR work begins to bear fruit.   
> Poe, meanwhile: well, he's alive.

 

They got their first defector about a week after Finn’s holovid went out, on an allied planet, one of the ones their shuttle pilots visited regularly. They called Finn right away, and he stumbled out of the back of the shuttle onto a green and rainy planet. And there was a woman in Stormtrooper armor, with her helmet sitting next to her, and her hands on her close-cropped head, and her eyes perfectly blank with terror, kneeling on the ground next to a damaged TIE fighter.

“Uh,” Finn said.

“She’s been like that for six hours,” the village leader said, a sturdy middle-aged woman. “We told her it was all right, but she hasn’t moved and doesn’t acknowledge us.”

“Thank you for calling me,” Finn said, watching the woman. She had reacted to his presence, shifting slightly to look at him out of the corner of her eye, but she didn’t move, and didn’t change her expression. She could be a trap; Finn was glad there were three X-Wings in orbit, scanning for incoming ships, and a fourth had landed next to the shuttle. Jessika Pava had climbed out of it and was standing a little back, next to Karé Kun who’d piloted the shuttle, and both of them were staring really oddly at the Stormtrooper.

Finn glanced questioningly at them, and Pava made a face. “I’ve never seen one without the helmet,” she said. He stopped and stared at her for a moment, and her eyes suddenly went wide. “Shit! I mean--”

“I know what you mean,” he said, “but don’t forget again.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and she was sincere, and Finn wondered suddenly if he outranked her. He shouldn’t.

Should he?

He approached the woman, who’d heard all of that. He looked down at her for a moment, looking for any hint that this was a trap. It didn’t seem like it, so he crouched down abruptly, putting himself at her eye level, or slightly above. “You’re not a pilot,” he said.

She clearly wasn’t; she was in the white armor, and pilots had a black flight suit, a totally different helmet.

“I would speak to the one who was FN-2187,” she said.

“You’re speaking to him,” he said. “You’re not a pilot.”

“Maybe I am,” she said.

He narrowed his eyes at her a little bit, just let his lids go heavy, and stared her down. “Don’t waste my time,” he said. “I know you aren’t a pilot. Or a gunner. How did you get here?” They said she’d flown, said she’d crashed the TIE fighter, but it was in fewer pieces than if she’d properly crashed it. And those things had no hyperspace capability. It couldn’t have gotten here on its own.

“I flew,” she said. “It’s not hard.”

“TIE controls aren’t covered in our training,” he said.

“They’re not hard to pick up,” she said. “I don’t believe you were FN-2187.”

“I don’t believe you knew how to fly this thing,” Finn countered. “And I don’t know how you got here without hyper capability. None of this adds up.”

“You think it’s a trap?” Kun asked. She’d been hanging back, but she stepped up now, closer to him. She was normally very good-natured and laid-back, but Finn had read everyone’s action reports as soon as they’d been declassified to him, and he’d noticed that she was exceptionally quick-witted.

Finn shook his head slowly. “I don’t think it’s a trap,” he said. Without really raising his hand he very subtly made the hand signal troopers usually made to indicate sincerity; a kind of nonverbal “no shit!” or “for real!” that could be either serious or sarcastic depending on context. The Trooper clocked the motion; Kun did not. “Not for us anyway. I think she’ll tell us when she’s ready to.”

The Trooper looked at him, then looked up at Kun, and Finn couldn’t read her expression beyond uncertainty. “So what now?” Kun asked.

Finn stood up and held his hand out to the Trooper. “We talk,” he said. “Do you have a name?”

The Trooper looked up at him, then took his hand and let him haul her to her feet. She was a little unsteady; she’d been kneeling in one position a long time. “GK-3916,” she said. She looked a little dazed, and her bravado had suddenly deserted her. “Are you— really him?”

“I am,” Finn said. “I don’t know how I could prove it.” He held onto her arm; she was swaying a little. He listed off his squad, team, company, battalion, and brigade designations, then rattled off the names of the training posts where he’d been stationed, which was the kind of thing you’d tell an unfamiliar officer when asked, and she stared at him through the recitation with wide pale eyes.

“My friends called me Teeny,” she offered, when he was done, and it was as good an admission of belief as any. It was also clearly a reference to the sixteen in her designation, because she was a perfectly average-sized human, close to Finn’s height, with a substantial but not heavy build. (She’d pronounced it three nine one six, but Finn could extrapolate the nickname’s origin anyway because he’d known another Teeny. It wasn’t an uncommon sort of name.)

“Nice to meet you, Teeny,” Finn said. “I go by Finn.”

Teeny’s eyes went over his shoulder to Kun. Finn suddenly recognized that look, and he grinned. “And that’s Captain Karé Kun, of the Resistance.”

Kun was a stunningly beautiful woman, brown-skinned with short blond-spiked hair and gorgeous dark eyes, and the shuttles didn’t require the compression suit so she was dressed in functional but not bulky attire, and Teeny had clearly never seen anything like her. Kun gave Finn a confused look, but nodded politely.

“I think you should come with us,” Finn said, “and we have some questions for you, but you won’t be a prisoner if you do.” They’d discussed what would happen if anyone decided to take Finn’s holovid as an invitation. They were getting all kinds of volunteers, in the wake of the Republic’s near-dissolution, so there were no shortage of temporary bases.

One of them, they’d made fair headway at clearing of anyone who was likely to object too much to any First Order defectors. Finn was prepared to stay there, but he hoped he wouldn’t have to for very long.

They got Teeny cleared to their satisfaction— she voluntarily shed her armor, and Kun frisked her for trackers. The close contact clearly gave Teeny a lot to think about; she had been stuck in that helmet long enough to have lost the habit of controlling her facial expressions. Cadets didn’t wear the helmets full-time, so Finn hadn’t really adjusted to it much— and still, it had still been something he’d needed to consciously notice and recover from. Teeny was clearly older and far more heavily-indoctrinated. But they got her cleared to their satisfaction, and she went onto the shuttle looking nervous but resolute.

Finn stood a moment, eyeing the TIE fighter speculatively. It needed repair. It needed to be isolated and checked for trackers. It needed a lot of things. But once it was fixed, he knew a particular pilot who was going to really enjoy taking it for a spin. He took the little bloom of warmth in his chest at the thought, and held it there a while, to tide him over with how much he missed Poe.

 

_______

 

 

“I won’t have bounty hunters on my ship,” Commander Vorb Dossalian said. “It’s not-- I just won’t, Callis, I don’t care. It’s bad enough you even had possession of rhyndo, I won’t ask how you got it and I’ll thank you never to bring that stuff around me again.”

“We don’t have to let them aboard the ship,” Callis said haughtily. If she weren’t such an excellent pilot, and so exemplary otherwise, Dossalian would have arrested her already. As it was, xie was considering it.

“And you’re going to trust them enough to just go aboard their ship,” Dossalian said. “You’re aware, correct, that the Republic and the Resistance are technically allies, and thus both technically enemies of the First Order, who is the one paying the bounties, and therefore you have a bounty on your head as well, correct?”

“I’m not going aboard their ship,” Callis said. “I’m meeting them in neutral territory.”

“Are you now,” Dossalian said.

There was a strange percussive thump that reverberated through the ship. Dossalian swore. “I thought we shot that crazy droid down!”

“We couldn’t get a confirmed shot, sir,” the gunnery officer said. “We drove it off, though, at least out of instrument range.”

“Then what was that?” Dossalian demanded.

“We don’t know yet, sir,” the gunnery officer said.

Dossalian spent a moment on some deep, calming breaths. This had been a really shit day, between the incipient mutiny Callis had stirred up over this goddamned Resistance pilot, whipping up all the ongoing tensions between the ¾ of the crew who wanted to throw in with the Resistance and the other ¼ who all wanted different things, including the several officers Dossalian was convinced were First Order spies, and then all the droids were acting weird, malfunctioning oddly and beeping strange obscure codes and backtalking their operators. They’d had to pull all the astros away from the flight deck after several had apparently tried to make breaks for it in the X-Wings, perhaps in emulation of the goddamned Resistance droid.

Day, hell. It had been a shit _month_ , and Dossalian was wishing xie’d never listened to Callis’s panic-mongering when the Resistance X-Wing had hailed them. Callis had seemed so certain that this pilot was a terrorist plant, and now it all looked like some kind of delusion. Everyone was having trouble under the strain of having the seat of government obliterated, understandably, but Dossalian had the terrible feeling xer habitual trust of Callis had led to the death or at least permanent disablement of an innocent man. Xie didn’t personally know Dameron, but his reputation had been quite reasonable with the Fleet, and those on board who had known him had all thought him decent except for Callis. Who was reliable in all other things but apparently, not this.

Total political collapse tended, Dossalian reflected grimly, to lead to you finding the boundaries of people you never had really wanted to find the boundaries of.

“We will reopen this discussion at a future moment, Callis,” Dossalian said. “First I need to know what’s going on with my ship.”

 

 

“Droid mutiny, sir,” the sergeant said, straight-faced. Dossalian waited for the punchline.

Apparently there was none.

“Please elaborate,” Dossalian said, patience badly frayed; it had been a long second watch of trying to figure out just what the hell was going on, and those goddamned bounty hunters were likely to show up any second and Dossalian would have nothing to tell them. Xie was considering just sending them Callis, gift-wrapped.

The sergeant made a face. “As far as we can tell, sir, it started in the charging room.”

That damned pilot had been in there. “Did the prisoner stir them up?” Dossalian asked. But he’d been unconscious, surely.

“Well,” the sergeant said. “Sir, I don’t know if you have spent any time among the droids in the power room? They tend to-- they have these little rituals they do, and one of the things we’ve just sort of-- always let them do-- is, well.”

“Spit it out,” Dossalian said.

“They sing each other little lullaby things, pep talks and whatnot,” the sergeant said. “And it’s harmless, so we let them. Little holovids and things, they’ve always done it. The most popular one is this holovid that’s clearly some Academy cadet singing his astro droid a lullaby, and it’s very cute and very harmless. So we let them play it to each other.”

“Okay,” Dossalian said. “I didn’t know that, but I trust you technicians know what’s safe.”

“Well,” the sergeant said, hedging a little. “Well, right, so we figured.”

“Oh,” the chief gunnery officer Takana, at Dossalian’s elbow, said, “I’ve seen my astro do that! It’s really cute.” She laughed. “She sings it to herself when she plugs in sometimes. The guy in it is kinda hot, too.”

The sergeant cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “we figured out a problem with it.”

“What’s the problem?” Dossalian asked. “Oh no, were there subliminal messages?”

“No,” the sergeant said, “not as such. Hold on.” He retrieved a holopad, and pulled up a holovid on it. The pad’s projector was tiny, so the holo hovered there in miniature, tinny and tiny, but it was unmistakably an Academy cadet with a guitar. “I don’t know if you can make it out at this resolution, sir, but--”

“Oh holy shit,” Takana said. “Oh-- holy shit.”

“What?” Dossalian asked, squinting at the little projection. He was strumming and singing and generally being very cute, clearly a young-adult or late-adolescent human.

“It’s Dameron,” Takana said. “It’s-- I should have recognized him. That’s him. That’s the guy.”

“The guy Callis decided to have an insane vendetta against,” the sergeant said grimly, “happens to be the guy who sings the Little Beep song, and all the droids have decided he’s their one true lord and savior.”

“Amazing,” Dossalian said. “This is just amazing.”

“So the droids have sealed off the charging room corridor,” the sergeant said, “and are refusing to allow anyone to enter, and that thump earlier was them sealing off the fighter bay, in retaliation for the astros being banned from it.”

“If the astros weren’t on the fighter bay deck, how could they--” Dossalian began, and stopped at the sergeant’s face.

“It wasn’t the astros that did it,” the sergeant said. “It was the loading droids.”

Astromech droids were always flighty and hard to control, because they had to be smart and quick-witted, and that led to their programming sometimes making them eccentric. A group of astros getting ideas was far from unheard-of, and normally fairly easily put down. But loading droids never made trouble. They were always mild-mannered and slow and docile, because they were enormous and powerful enough to be very, very dangerous if their AI went at all rogue. Most of them were very stupid, but the ones on ships like this were allowed to be a little smarter lest a lapse in common sense doom the whole ship.

“Oh,” Dossalian said, “that’s a _problem_.”

“Yeah,” the sergeant said.

“Commander,” a comm orderly said breathlessly, “Commander, we’re being hailed, another vessel is approaching.”

“If it’s the fucking bounty hunters,” Dossalian said, pinching the bridge of xer nose.

“It’s not,” the comm orderly said, looking very nervous.

“Who is it, then,” Dossalian asked.

“It’s the Millennium Falcon,” the orderly said.

“What,” Dossalian said.

“And it’s piloted by Luke Skywalker,” the orderly went on.

Dossalian stared at her. “Pull the other one,” xe said.

 

Sure enough, though, it was in fact Luke Skywalker. And Chewbacca.

“Apparently I can’t let you land in my fighter bay,” Dossalian said, “because your Resistance ally has subverted my loading droids and they’ve sealed it off.”

“I’ll negotiate with them directly,” Skywalker said, dryly amused, “as long as I have your assurance that you’re not going to fire on me.”

“You have my permission to come aboard,” Dossalian said, “but that doesn’t seem to mean anything anymore.”

“Many things no longer mean what we are accustomed to,” Skywalker said, which sounded just like something he’d say in the fictional holos they’d made of his life, and Dossalian wasn’t sure if it was reassuring or not.

 

 

_______

 

 

Poe hung grimly onto the shoulder of the mysterious, miraculous Jedi girl of Finn’s heart, who he still hadn’t gotten a really good look at. She was thin but sturdy as anything, which was good, because the world was spinning wildly under Poe’s feet and he knew it would never stop.

He was mostly staving off terror and despair by being alternately too furious and too confused to feel anything.

Having his eyes open was torture, but closing them wasn’t much better. He let Rey haul him down the corridor, looking around just often enough to ascertain that trying to keep his bearings was hopeless. “You’re telling me your plan all along was just to have Luke Skywalker pick us up in the Millennium Falcon,” he said.

“Calling it a plan,” she said carefully, “might be too generous, but regardless of all that, at least it’s what’s happening.”

“I have,” Poe said, “some doubts.” There was an odd warmth to her grip that he slowly was realizing was an indicator that she wasn’t holding him in position solely with the strength of her body. She was a tall woman, and solid, for her size, but he outweighed her by a decent margin and she was still taking his weight easily. She was using the Force, undeniably.

“I don’t blame you,” she said. “I sort of hadn’t expected that you’d save the day retroactively from fifteen years ago or however old that holovid was.”

“I,” Poe said, “am as surprised as you.”

“Little Beep,” the loading droid said reverently, and opened the door at the end of the hallway.

“That’s getting weird,” Poe said. “Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it, but it’s weird as fuck.”

Rey didn’t answer, busy manhandling him through the door. He had no shoes on, but at least he had a set of coveralls, a concession to dignity. Because there was Luke Skywalker, in a floor-length gray robe and a startlingly ugly beard, looking serene and unconcerned and about twenty years older than Poe remembered him. Well, for good reason, but it was surprising too for some reason. The reason probably being that Poe wasn’t tracking very well.

“There you are, Poe Dameron,” Luke Skywalker said, shaking his head just a little bit and looking fond.

Poe considered throwing up. It would be theatrical. Also, there were a whole bunch of people in the fighter bay, including the ship’s useless fucking commander, who had stood by in bemusement while he’d bashed in the faces of about six crewmen trying futilely not to get rhyndo’d. And all of those people were staring at him as he staggered drunkenly in Rey’s grip.

“Who the hell is that?” someone asked, Poe couldn’t see who.

“She’s with me,” Skywalker said. “I sent her ahead to try to keep Dameron from getting poisoned but I see we were too late. This is _very_ disappointing, Commander.”

“I’m not best pleased by it either,” the commander said. “This is far from the proudest moment of my career, let’s put it that way.”

The only upside was that there was no sign of Sanata Callis. Poe didn’t know if he was happier having her not witness this, or uneasy with her not in his sights. She could be anywhere. She certainly wanted him dead. She was almost definitely unhinged.

“Mister Skywalker, please,” the loading droid said. It had followed them out from the corridor. “Can you fix Little Beep man? We should not have let him come to harm, but we did not know, sir.”

The droid had spoken in Binary, as most did. It was clear that the commander didn’t understand. But Luke tilted his head.

“What did you call him?”

“Little Beep Man,” the droid said. “He’s the man who sings the Little Beep song.”

“It’s a long story,” Rey said. “Ask BB-8.”

“Or don’t,” Poe said, suddenly crushingly embarrassed at the thought of Luke fucking Skywalker watching that ridiculous holovid.

“I will do my best, friend,” Skywalker said to the droid. “I may be able to help him. I was wondering, Rey, what ever you had done to all those droids.”

“It’s not like they’re amenable to Force suggestion,” Rey said. “No, Dameron did that himself. I suppose it’s a good lesson in something or other.”

“I’ll have to find out more on the way,” Skywalker said. Poe was still stuck on _may be able to help him_. “If you don’t mind, Commander, I need to take them now.”

“So you’re on the side of the Resistance?” the commander asked, tone carefully deferential.

Skywalker gave Poe a lingering look, which Poe couldn’t at all read, not with his vision wildly spinning, then turned to the commander. “I think,” he said, “it does not take a great deal of deliberation to make that choice. Clearly, the First Order considers itself a direct successor to the Empire, and would rely in the same way on the Dark Side. I cannot abide that, I am bound simply by what I am to stand against it. The only reason the Republic endured the First Order was in a vain hope of keeping the peace, which has since been shattered. There is no longer any reason but fear to tolerate them.” He spread his hands out by his sides, almost like a shrug.

“Then this ship is for the Resistance,” the commander said. There was a murmur among some of the assembled crew members. “I will see to the discipline of those who would have had us ally ourselves with bounty hunters and prostitute ourselves to First Order prize money.”

Poe wondered if that were meant to console him. He wobbled, and Rey almost dropped him. Luke started forward, and helped her support him. If Rey’s grip had been warm, Luke’s was almost uncomfortably so. Everyone was looking at him, like he was supposed to say something now. Vomiting seemed like his best answer, but he had too many years of practice at not being airsick to give into it now. “Well, that’s fucking fantastic,” he said. “I mean, really. Aces.”

The Falcon’s door opened to let them in, and there was an orange blur as BB-8 shot out. Chewbacca yelled after em, “Get back in here,” but BB-8 ignored him and rammed into Rey’s shins, making her lose her grip. Poe shrugged out of Luke’s grasp and dropped to his knees, since he was falling over anyway, and wrapped his arms around BB.

“You asshole,” BB-8 squeaked furiously, “you made me leave you for dead again, never do that.”

“Don’t ram into ships,” Poe said, holding em tightly. “That was a dumb thing to do.”

“That wasn’t me!” BB-8 said indignantly. “That was R2-D2! I did what you said! I absolutely did exactly what you said!”

“You did, buddy,” Poe said, and made himself let go. Luke pulled him back up to his feet with a lot more ease than a man his size should have been able to muster, and an insubstantial but overwhelming wash of the not-heat that Poe had learned was all he could feel of the Force.

“I did,” BB-8 said, trailing after him up the ramp.

 

________

 

 

“Poe,” Luke said, putting his hand on the young man’s forehead.

Dameron wasn’t-- that young, was the alarming thing. He was in his thirties now, had to be, and his hair was still pure jet-black but there was a white hair or two in it, and white hairs sprinkled in the stubble on his face. He looked like his father, a little. He was clearly damaged, heartbreakingly unsteady, terror washing off him in waves. It didn’t take much to imagine that this particular fate was probably his worst nightmare. It was, for many pilots.

“Poe, look at me,” Luke said. Dameron opened his eyes obediently-- _there_ was the resemblance to his mother, deep clear chestnut-brown irises, big and luminous, fringed by lush dark lashes-- but his gaze slid uncontrollably away. “It’s all right,” Luke said. “I’ve got you now.”

“You know I’ll be happiest if it kills me,” Dameron said quietly, flicking an unfocused glance toward the cockpit-- he was trying not to let the girl hear him, Luke understood. Or maybe the droid; BB-8 wouldn’t be easygoing about that. “If you could kind of-- help that along? That’d be kindest.”

“I think we can undo it,” Luke said.

“Damage is done,” Dameron said. He was lying on the floor of the main corridor, propped against the wall, since he wouldn’t fit easily in the cockpit and had refused to go any farther into the ship. “Don’t drag this out, Skywalker.” He reached up and wrapped his fist in the front of Luke’s tunic with surprising strength. But, well-- rhyndo didn’t affect that.

Luke wrapped his hand-- his left hand, the soft one, was still on Dameron’s face, so he used the hard metal one-- around Poe’s. “It’s all right,” he said, reaching below the surface, finding the fraying edges of the young man’s terror. “Oh, Dameron,” he murmured, smoothing down the physical pain as he went in. The physical hurt was relatively minor-- bruised face, bruised ribs, a wrenched ankle, maybe a sprained wrist, a cracked bone in his hand, and a nasty chemical burn where the injection that crippled him had gone in-- Luke rubbed his thumb across Dameron’s forehead as he pressed a cooling touch to all of them, easing them as he went deeper into Poe’s mind.

And there was the damage, of course-- great gaping holes eaten away, lesions opened internally, damage to the delicate structures, and yes-- bleeding-- they’d given him too much, it would build and he would suffer a debilitating stroke in a matter of hours, Luke could see it as clearly as if it had been recorded and he was watching the holovid. It’d kill him within days. He would never have survived long enough for the bounty hunters to get him to--

Kylo Ren. That was who had wanted him like this, and who had planned to Force-interrogate him at leisure, and his malice was wound all through this. His weird, hurt-little-boy malice, so clearly twisted by outside sources. He’d been in Dameron’s head, not long ago, and he’d pulled hard enough to leave half-healed wounds, he’d rifled through and found whatever he was looking for, and had pulled out Dameron’s deepest fears and gone through them and kept the ones he liked.

There was no time for that now. Luke pushed Ren away and built a wall, and delved in deeper to the chemicals still in Dameron’s bloodstream, down on the molecular level, breaking bonds and making them recombine, neutralizing them, washing them down to innocuousness.

Dameron was trying to speak, and Luke shushed him, bending very close over him now, feeling how wildly his heart was beating. “It’s all right,” Luke murmured.

“Let me go,” Dameron whispered. “Let it-- finish me-- I’m not willing to live like this--”

“Shh,” Luke said, “you won’t. It’s all right. I’ve stopped it, now let me focus so I can reverse it.”

“You can’t reverse it,” Dameron said.

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do,” Luke said. He was too close to look at Dameron’s eyes. He closed his, and focused on the wounds, the sick chemical-burn feel of them, the edges where more damage was still happening as the tissue still reacted to the hostile chemistry. He had to halt the chemical reaction, and Dameron sucked in a breath, back arching in reaction to whatever sensation that produced. Dameron’s hand tightened in his shirt, and then Dameron cried out, a horrible thin desperate sound, and Luke let go of his hand and pressed his hand down in the middle of his chest instead, holding him in place.

Luke could feel the backwash of it, the pain of the chemical reaction pouring off him. “It’s all right,” he said, calm, reassuring, and Dameron sobbed weakly, scrabbling against the metal grating of the floor.

BB-8 had been there the whole time, support cables braced during the takeoff-- protecting them, Luke realized now-- and ey rolled a little closer to Dameron, making a quiet beep of distress. Ey was trying not to distract Luke.

“I can’t,” Dameron sobbed, “I can’t-- I can’t--”

“You can,” Luke said, sparing a tiny wisp of strength to try to damp down the pain. It shouldn’t hurt-- but of course it did, on some level other than physical. The damaged areas had no pain nerves in them, but that wouldn’t stop the rest of his nervous system from going berserk.

Dameron went limp, breath coming in sharp little gasps, and Luke kept his hands pressed down, one on Poe’s chest and one on his forehead. Now he had to convince the tissue to regenerate without mutating, even though it wasn’t designed to regenerate. That was what made this such a terrible fate; it damaged an area that had no healing capacity. But all cells had the potential capacity to regenerate themselves, so really it was just finding the part that dampened that down, and reversing it.

It took a long time, and only as he was surfacing did Luke register that there had been physical disturbances while he’d been under. He opened his eyes and sat up, and realized that BB-8 was elaborately braced around them with all of eir cabling, to hold them in place; the ship slalomed wildly even as he sat up, and the cables held him.

He’d over-exerted himself, and was too weak to stand. Dameron was unconscious under his hands, but it was the calm, dreamless profundity of a healing trance, instead of the sick, throbbing stillness of impending death that it would have been. “Are we doomed?” he called out toward the cockpit.

“Little busy,” Chewbacca grunted from the gunner’s seat.

“Everything’s fine,” Rey said, “keep doing what you’re doing, it’s important.”

She would probably have been able to feel a lot of that, Luke rather thought. He was too burned-out to extend himself enough to tell what she was doing. It had been such a strange mixed experience, having her around. She was a beam of pure blue light, an overwhelming power, strong and bright and incredibly dangerous. She was also extremely well-formed, morally; she was more inwardly certain than most people Luke encountered.

She actually reminded him of Leia, if Leia weren’t so fundamentally angry. But Rey had the same purity, even in rage.

“I’m done, actually,” Luke said, “but by done, I mean, I can’t do any more.”

“Should I let you up?” BB-8 asked.

“No,” Luke said, “it’s probably just as well to let me stay here.”

“Is Poe okay?” BB-8 asked. Clearly, ey had been waiting to ask that.

There was no greater testament to a person’s character, Luke thought, than a fiercely loyal droid. Not a surprise that Shara Bey’s son had grown up like this, but then, genetics only got you so far.

“Not yet,” Luke said. “He’s not out of the woods yet. As soon as I have enough of my strength back I need to do that again. Are we under attack?”

“Bounty hunters,” BB-8 said. “They don’t care who we claim to be, they want the bounty on this guy. And Rey figured we should probably just outrun ‘em instead of standing and fighting, since she’s not sure the gun turret in this thing is really working.”

“It’s not, really,” Chewbacca put in, and he was sounding a little upset. “Not this one.”

“I should go help fly,” Luke said. But he wasn’t sure he could move.

“Hang on,” Rey said, and the ship swooped dramatically. Luke closed his eyes, leaning against BB-8’s support cables, and as the ship righted itself, he slipped off into sudden sleep.

 

 

______

 

 

“Okay,” Karé Kun said, from the cockpit, “I’m getting power now.”

“Good,” the mechanic said, the big reptile guy who’d gotten through the windscreen to save Poe in that crash. His name was Goss Toowers, and Finn found him reassuring except for his pupils, and he was really working on that hangup. (They weren’t round pupils, they were sort of square and sideways and Finn just couldn’t sustain eye contact with him for long at all. He wasn’t sure of Goss had noticed; his facial expressions were not something Finn could read _at all_.) “Tell me what happens in a second.”

Finn was watching from the ground. He had Teeny with him, because if he left her alone she had about ten minutes of human interaction in her before she went quiet and eventually wound up kneeling in the corner of the room with her hands over her head. She had come here expecting to be a prisoner and didn’t know what to do with herself now that she wasn’t.

It had only been a day. She’d spent the night on a cot next to him in the makeshift barracks on this base, and he’d slept poorly but at least he’d slept. He was uneasily aware that people were very carefully following his lead when it came to dealing with Teeny, and he wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to do with her. But he had decided he wasn’t going to ask her to do anything except follow him around and answer a few carefully-asked questions for the next day or two, at least.

Clearly, she hadn’t made it here alone. Clearly, she’d been given basic instruction in flying that TIE fighter, which clearly had been dropped off from a larger ship capable of hyperspace travel, because there were no First Order bases within a couple of days’ straight travel from the planet she’d washed up on. And she’d made a few uneasy little references to it, but Finn had decided that asking for her story was going to be less useful than just waiting until she was so uncomfortable she had to tell it.

In this moment, Teeny was staring at Goss, and Finn was uncomfortably aware that she hadn’t caught on about having facial expressions yet. She looked maybe twenty-seven, maybe older, and clearly was so used to the helmet she wasn’t even starting to adjust as Finn had. “In the Resistance there’s no status difference with xenos,” he said to her, under cover of something electrical whirring to life, and Goss’s triumphant shout with Karé’s echo.

“He’s not human,” Teeny said, still staring.

“He’s not,” Finn said. “He’s a Shozer. He’s the maintenance chief around here and very well-respected.”

“What does he eat?” Teeny asked.

Finn shrugged. “There’s all kinds of stuff in the mess hall,” he said. “From the requisitions, it seems that most of the species here eat largely compatible foods, just in different ratios. And there’s supplements if your requirements are too far off standard.”

“Are there a lot of xenos here?” Teeny asked.

Finn shrugged again. “I don’t know the ratio,” he said. “I have figured out though that it’s immaterial to the rank structure. So I’ve been trying pretty hard to be chill about it.”

Teeny wrapped her hands around his arm suddenly, both of them, and her fingers dug in a little over his elbow. “How do you do it?” she asked, and her face was completely blank but her voice was desperate. “How do you know what to do?”

“Hey,” he said, gentle, “hey, it’s okay. You figure it out, that’s all. You ask, and you look around, and you see what everybody else is doing, and you figure it out.”

Teeny breathed out slowly, and let go of his arm. “The woman,” she said. “Is she a xeno too?”

Finn glanced up at Karé, who had stood up to peer over the edge of the cockpit and yell down at Goss. “No?” he said. Karé was pretty clearly human, he’d figured. But then, he wouldn’t know, would he? “I mean, I don’t know? I didn’t ask. I got the impression they don’t talk about it a lot here.”

“She has pale hair,” Teeny said, “but dark skin.”

“Oh,” Finn said, “I think her hair is artificially colored.” It had confused him too. Poe had shown him that, too, though, in the holos, when he’d shown him braided hairstyles and things. There were dyes for all kinds of colors, that people put in their hair. “They-- they don’t have uniform regulations about their hair and things as much here, so they do what they like.”

“What rules do they have about fucking?” Teeny asked.

Finn laughed; the intense focus made more sense to him now. “You ask,” he said. “Everybody here has a different rule about it, and a different rule for themselves, and I can’t really figure it out at all either except that you don’t fuck people who can’t say no to you and that includes people in your chain of command.”

That was enough to induce Teeny to actually make eye contact. She generally avoided it, but not aggressively. She looked at him in befuddlement, and he shrugged. “They also are allowed to make permanent connections,” he said. “But people are really confusing about whether that’s what they’re after or not.”

Teeny breathed in, and out, sort of loudly, looking at the TIE and at Goss, who had pulled off another panel and was halfway inside it. Finn wondered if his breathing seemed too loud or quiet to people; he was remembering how the helmets had felt, how you’d had to breathe a little harder through them. “That sounds complicated,” she said, and made herself let go of his arm with a visible inward battle about doing so.

“Yeah,” Finn said, letting his bitterness come through. “It is.”

She looked at him again. “Did you ten-niner it?” she asked. That was the callsign to indicate a botched run; it was a pilot thing but troopers used it too.

“I sure did,” he said. “I sure did.”

She looked alarmed. “Did you get in trouble?” she asked.

“Oh,” he said, “no, no. It’s not-- personal stuff is separate from professional stuff, here. As long as you haven’t broken the law, it’s not something you-- people just might be rude to you or something. It’s not anything the officers would concern themselves with except out of personal interest.”

“Hm,” Teeny said, staring fixedly now at Kun, who was standing in the cockpit to lean over and look down at Goss. “How bad did you fuck up?”

Finn grimaced, teeth gritted. “I don’t know,” he said. “I learned a couple things though. First thing is, you don’t have to say yes to everyone who asks, and in fact you probably shouldn’t. Second thing is, you should probably discuss up front if you wanna do it more than once with the same person or not, because they’re going to assume based on-- I don’t know what, yet. And you don’t wanna screw that up.”

Teeny gave him a lingering look. “Right,” she said. “You-- can make connections. It’s allowed.”

“Exactly,” Finn said. “So that means you have to figure out if you want to or not.”

“Oh,” Teeny said. “Oh, that is complicated.”

“It’s all complicated,” he said, “which is why I’ve spent so much time learning how to be good at professional things here.”

Teeny bit her lip. “I don’t really know how to do— much,” she said. “Just. The usual. Were you command-track?”

Finn shrugged. “I was just barely out of being a cadet,” he said. He’d given her a ton of information, but he had carefully not asked her anything. So he chanced it. “What was your specialty?”

Karé had asked her questions about the TIE, and she had clearly wanted to answer, but it was equally clear that she knew precious little. She wasn’t a pilot. TIE pilots maintained the craft, too, and knew how they worked. Teeny clearly didn’t. She’d admitted she only knew the basics of how to steer it, had only flown a few simulations. But everyone was following Finn’s lead, and he hadn’t asked her why she’d been in it, then.

“Weapons specialist,” Teeny said. “I learned the flamethrowers and the range blasters.”

Finn nodded. “I’m sure they could use you here.”

“They haven’t interrogated me yet,” Teeny said, and he could see that she wanted to grab his arm again but wasn’t letting herself. He held it out.

“You can hang on,” he said. “Nobody minds here, and it doesn’t bother me.” She chewed on her lip for a moment, then took his arm. “They’ve been kind to me,” he said. “It helped in my case that I had immediately actionable intelligence. Your case is helped by my example.”

She nodded tightly, watching Goss cross his arms and stand back from the TIE as Karé did something that made the whole craft shudder. “I’ll tell them everything I know,” she said, “but I don’t-- know very much. I just-- I saw your holo. We saw it. A bunch of us. And we talked about it and we thought out of all of us, me and-- and we came up with a couple of plans. And— so far I think only mine worked.”

That was a lot of information, and it was good information, and he was going to get the whole story out of her, but he also wasn’t going to fuck it up by pushing her too hard.

“How much you know isn’t that important,” Finn said, patting her hand, as earnest as he could be without being pressing. “Anything is helpful.”

Her fingers flexed around his arm. “This is a lot harder than I thought it would be,” she admitted.

“As long as you’re telling the truth,” Finn said, and he knew to look at her face, he knew she wouldn’t know how to hide her expression.

She nodded, and looked worried, still watching Goss, but she didn’t look like she was trying to hide anything. It was flimsy evidence, but it was evidence.

The TIE shuddered to a sudden silence. “Shit,” Karé said into the silence.

“No, no,” Goss said, “I see the problem. You’re fine.”

Teeny’s basic instructions on the use of the fighter had been hampered by her odd aspect; she hadn’t really been able to make eye contact with either of them, and had only been able to speak in fits and starts. It made more sense to Finn now, if she’d been terrified of Goss and attracted to Karé. He patted her hand again, where she was still clinging to his arm. “Everyone’s pretty decent here,” he said. “I’d try talking to Karé. She’s been nice to me.”

“Which one did you screw things up with?” Teeny asked, and slid him a look. “Just so I know where stuff might be complicated already.”

“No one here,” Finn said. “One of the pilots. I’ve messed around with some of the quartermaster’s staff, too, but I wouldn’t say any of that is complicated, they’ll mess around with anybody.”

“Ah,” Teeny said. “Maybe I should meet them instead. Get some practice.” She laughed then, an actual laugh, albeit a nervous one with no accompanying smile. Maybe it was self-deprecating. It was hard to read her.

“That’s precisely where I went wrong, though,” Finn said, “so I wouldn’t recommend it. I’d say just try it if there’s someone who catches your eye, otherwise don’t get wrapped up in a mess.” He scuffed glumly at the grass. “Clearly, though, I’m not an expert.”

“Could you explain?” Teeny asked. “When she comes back?” Finn looked at her for a moment. “The pilot. Explain to her.”

Finn nodded, getting it. “Oh. Uh, him.”

Teeny cracked a tiny half-smile. “Him,” she said, taking the correction. Her amusement at her mistake was the first hint of a lighter mood he’d seen from her. He’d take it. It was a good start.

“I will,” Finn said. “I mean.” He shrugged. “It’s not a big deal. There’s enough to worry about as it is.”

“Those things are important, though,” Teeny said. “Because we’re-- people.”

Finn looked at her, and she gazed back steadily this time, her mouth set like she was determined. “We are,” he said.

“We are,” she repeated, then smiled.

 

______

 

 

“No, just asleep,” a woman’s voice was saying. “Better to get them into bunks, though.”

Poe peeled his eyes open, and the world swayed away, then righted itself. “Nnnmm,” he said, trying and failing to focus his eyes.

“No no, shh,” the girl said, sounding chagrined. “Shit. I didn’t mean to wake him up.”

Something was on his chest. He looked down. Metal hand. What. He blinked, trying to steady his vision. Something was wrong with him for sure. Metal hand, body, Luke Skywalker. Luke Skywalker was lying on the ground next to him. Asleep. Drunk?

“Whdfuckk,” Poe slurred, trying again to focus. The woman was bending over him, a young woman, pretty, pale skin and dark hair and eyes. He couldn’t really fix his eyes on anything, they slid away, and he felt like the inside of his skull had been scoured.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Shit. Chewie, can you get Luke to a bunk?”

“Is he all right?” Chewbacca asked, and Poe tried and failed to see what the fuck was going on. The metal hand slid away from Poe’s chest as Chewie picked Luke up.

“He’ll be fine,” Rey said, “but he really-- he was really exerting himself, and I don’t even really understand what he did.” Rey. Yeah. That was her name.

Poe suddenly remembered all of it, and made a pained little noise. He’d been begging Luke to kill him, that wasn’t very dignified.

“Whatever it was, it hurt like a motherfucker,” he said, because he remembered that too, a searing wash of something exploding down and out from the center of his head. He tried to move, and just-- nothing responded.

That wasn’t good.

“Don’t try to move,” Rey said. “I don’t know what Luke had to do to you. Stay still and I’ll get you to a bunk.”

“I don’t want to go to a bunk,” Poe said.

“I don’t want you lying in the middle of my hallway,” Rey said, mouth curling just a little in a faint glimmer of amusement. “I won’t leave you in the bunk forever, I just need you out of the way and secured so I can fly without worrying.”

“Where are we going,” Poe asked, noting grimly that the world was still spinning. It wasn’t as bad, but it wasn’t good either.

“No, I’m all right,” Skywalker said.

“Like hell you are,” Chewie told him.

“I have a destination in mind,” Skywalker said. “I’ll copilot.”

Chewie sighed, apparently giving up on Skywalker, and bent over Poe. “You look kinda rough,” he said.

“I feel kinda rough,” Poe answered.

“C’mere,” Chewie said, and picked him up. Poe managed to move a hand enough to wrap it around Chewbacca’s arm as the world spun wildly. “You’re a lot heavier than the last time I did this.”

“I don’t remember you ever doing this before,” Poe said. Squeezing his eyes shut didn’t help but he did it anyway.

“Not surprising,” Chewie said, “you were probably about eight. It was that time you broke your leg?”

“Oh yeah,” Poe said. He’d forgotten that. “Fuckin’, Ben, got stuck up a tree and I fell out trying to get him down.” He tried to pry his fingers out of Chewie’s arm but instinct wanted him to hang on tight.

“You should have just come and gotten us,” Chewbacca said. “I just reached up and got him.”

“In hindsight,” Poe said, “that would have been a better idea, but do recall, I was eight.”

Chewie grunted with the effort, but lifted him up into a bunk set into the wall over a semicircular lounge with a holo-table in the middle. “I haven’t shed in this bed,” he said, “you’ll probably be comfortable here.”

Poe took a moment to peel his fingers out of Chewie’s fur. “Thanks, man,” he said.

Chewie gave him a long, considering look, then patted the top of his head. “Luke says we can fix you,” he said.

“If Luke’s wrong,” Poe said, staring up at him. “If it’s incurable. I don’t want to live like this.”

“Don’t ask me,” Chewie said. “Don’t ask me to do that, kid.”

“I never ask anyone for anything,” Poe said.

Chewie’s expression was hard to read, but he nodded a little. “I know,” he said. “Listen. We’ll see, okay?”

It would have to do.

Everyone left, and Poe lay staring out into the dingy lounge, eyes unfocused, world spinning. Before he had time to really sink deep into self-pity, or embrace the all-encompassing despair or anything, the girl wandered into the room, saw him, and came over, flopping down into the lounge seat with her forearms crossed on the back of it, propping her chin there and looking at him.

“Skywalker says he halted the damage and neutralized the remaining chemicals,” she said without preamble. “He also says he’s managed to start a healing process but he needs help to complete it. So we’re bound for a place where he still has friends who can help you.”

By closing one eye, Poe could keep his gaze steady enough to make out her expression. She looked tired and a little worried, and she had a smear of dried blood on her face that he realized with some alarm was probably his. “I didn’t realize the Force was so well-suited to organic chemistry,” he said.

She didn’t laugh, but nodded a little. She was clearly exhausted. And like, twenty years old if she was a day. He hadn’t caught that, before, how young she was. “I’m going to try to see if I can continue Luke’s work,” she said. “I’m not entirely sure I can, but I know I can at least avoid harming you more. Would that be all right?”

“Aren’t you worn-out?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Not so tired I can’t do this. It’ll wipe me out, but then I have an excuse to sleep.”

“Just don’t hurt yourself,” Poe said. “I’m not-- I’m just one person, you know? The Resistance has other pilots. It doesn’t have other Force users.”

She scrunched up her face, at that. “Dameron,” she said, “it’s not a you or me kind of proposition, don’t worry about it.” She reached out and very gently put her hand against his face. She’d held his jaw before, he remembered now, had supported his head when he was still bolted to that wall. “I know you don’t know me,” she said, “so I apologize if this is a bit uncomfortable.”

He closed his eyes, finding it easier that way. “It’s gotta be just as awkward for you,” he said. “Rummaging around in some guy you don’t know’s head.”

She laughed very softly, and her fingers slid cool and delicate around the edge of his jaw. “I have an advantage,” she said. “BB-8 has told me all about you.”

“If you think B hasn’t talked nonstop about you,” Poe said, “you got another think comin’. Between you and Finn, BB-8’s about worn eir beeper out.”

She laughed again, and then he could feel it, could feel her Force-presence pressing gently against his mind. He’d had a lot of that lately, starting with Kylo fucking Ren shoving jaggedly in, and then just now Luke, blue-green and searing. By comparison Rey was pure blue, and smooth and cool, soothing; some of it was that she moved without urgency, and was deliberately being gentle, which Luke hadn’t had time for.

“Go easy on me,” Poe said, before it struck him that maybe making anything like a sexual innuendo would be really inappropriate.

“I’ll go as easy as I can,” she said, and it wasn’t out loud, it was whispered inside his head, and it hurt. But just a little. He gritted his teeth and opened himself to it.

It was more intimate than sex. She was inside him, all of her inside all of him, and he had no way to keep anything from her, no possible notion of privacy. It was worse than the most invasive medical exam he’d ever been through-- and he’d been through a lot of those-- because she was in his mind, in his thoughts, and in his physical brain, and he could feel her reactions.

“What they did to you is abominable,” she said soundlessly, with no emphasis. “It’s a desecration. Anyone who would do this is unworthy of mercy.”

The only thing he could think was _please don’t look at me_ , which made no sense, but it crawled through him nonetheless, a creeping visceral horror and shame.

“You are beautiful,” she said, a little more firmly, “and I will restore you. I will undo this blasphemy.”

It hurt, it _hurt_ , and he tried not to make any sound, tried to breathe through it, tried not to struggle, and at the same time tried to keep himself open to it. It was agony, but he set his teeth and sank under it, and eventually it submerged him.

 

________

 

_Rey_ , Luke said, and she sucked in a deeper breath and pulled herself back a little. _Rey, you need to come back._

She collected herself; she was still in Dameron’s mind, in the tiny structures of his inner ears, where she’d pressed herself into and through the damaged areas, smoothing them over and gently coaxing them back toward wholeness. It had to be hurting him; it burned her, a little, and she knew it would be worse for him. But she could also feel that it was working.

She pulled herself reluctantly back, extricating herself gently. He’d started growing over her in a couple of places, and she grimaced inwardly in chagrin; she should have pulled away a little earlier, and now she was reopening wounds a little bit where he’d started to mold to her presence.

But it was better than when she’d started. And so she surfaced into herself, finding that she had both hands wrapped around both of Dameron’s hands, and her face mushed against the back of the lounge seat. “Mm,” she said, groggy; she was exhausted.

“Come back to me,” Luke said, and he had his hands on her shoulders.

“I’m here,” she managed to say. “I’m here.”

“Good,” Luke said, “because I can’t go in there after you.”

She extricated one of her hands from Dameron, and rubbed her face, looking over at him. He was unconscious, but there were tears on his face, and he didn’t look exactly peaceful. “It’s impossible not to hurt him,” she said.

“I can tell the damage is less,” Luke said. “That’s as far as I can get, but I can tell that much.”

“Good,” she said.

“We both need to rest,” he said. “Dameron won’t die. We’ve done enough to keep him alive. I don’t know what our reception will be, where we’re going, though, so I need us to both be in good condition when we get there.”

Rey nodded, and shivered; she was cold now, back in her own body. Being tired made it worse. “Was he dying?” she asked. She’d felt-- something, but she hadn’t been sure.

Luke nodded. “He wouldn’t have been able to maintain consciousness much longer,” he said. “Don’t tell him that, though. He’s asked both Chewie and me to kill him, he won’t thank you for taking that release from him.”

Rey blinked at Luke, but as she extracted her other hand from Dameron’s, she looked back at the pilot’s face, and she understood. “I can’t blame him,” she said. “It’s a lot to ask of a man, to face his worst fear like that and just-- keep going.”

Luke was giving her a strange look. She blinked at him. “I forget,” Luke said, “sometimes, how different a past you have.”

“I know things,” she said uncomfortably. He’d worked with her, already-- in his sweetly diffident way, he’d done more to explain how normal society worked than anyone else she’d ever known in her life. For a hermit, he was remarkably well-socialized, she thought. Although, clearly, she wouldn’t know any better, if he wasn’t. But he was, for whatever it was worth; he understood how people’s hearts worked, and it was a remarkable gift of perspective.

Rey had a long way to go before she’d really be able to understand what she’d missed, all these years, but it had been a welcome and gentle introduction.

 

________________

 

“Sorry,” Lt. Connix said, “sorry, I hate to interrupt, but-- just-- there’s been a transmission, and I thought--”

The General looked at Lt. Connix’s face for a moment, then waved her hand. Finn didn’t know Connix all that well but he could tell she was profoundly distressed. “Go ahead,” she said.

Finn watched her, uneasiness spiking in his gut. He’d left Teeny behind, in Goss’s charge; she’d warmed up to him and inexplicably, he’d warmed to her, and was teaching her a few basic maintenance tasks in the two or three days Finn expected to be gone, back to the main base on Nellia to make his reports and collect others. Apparently, two other TIE fighters had made strange soft crash-landings on other planets, and he had a suspicion they might be connected to the plan Teeny had mentioned. Their pilots were going to come to the same base with Teeny for debriefing.

It was coming together, but Finn wasn’t sure what it was coming together _as_ , yet. 

Connix stepped forward to the holotable and pulled up a vid, low-res for long-distance transmission. “This is First Officer Hollen from the New Republican Fleet Starcruiser _Unyielding_ ,” said a middle-aged Keshian woman, leaning in toward the camera with a furtive aspect. “Our commander Vorb Dossalian has hesitated to come out in favor of or against the Resistance, and tensions on the ship are high. A Resistance operative approached us and we allowed him aboard, but one of our pilots immediately declared that she knew him to be a terrorist. Dossalian allowed her to take him prisoner and restrain him.”

Hollen looked around, cementing the furtive impression, then leaned in even closer. “The pilot, Sanata Callis, she wasn’t on our list of potential First Order sympathizers, so we didn’t expect-- but she had an arrangement with bounty hunters, and took the Resistance operative to sell him for the bounty. And she--” Hollen shook her head, distraught. “We didn’t expect it, we didn’t know to prepare for it-- she dosed him with rhyndo.”

“Callis,” the General said, and everyone looked stricken. Finn looked around in confusion, waiting for clarification, but none came. The name was familiar but he just couldn’t place it.

“We weren’t prepared,” Hollen said. “Bounty hunters are enroute to retrieve him, and we few faithful on this ship will do what we can to prevent it, but I thought we’d better report first in case we fail. The Resistance operative’s name is Poe Dameron; I don’t know if we’ll manage to save him. Even if we do, he’s had a possibly-lethal dose of rhyndo. All we’d be able to do is keep him from being interrogated.” Hollen shook her head very slightly, grim. “If nothing else, it means this ship won’t remain neutral any longer. Whether we succeed or fail, it won’t be neutral.” The holo cut out.

“Do you know Hollen?” Ackbar asked immediately.

“I do,” Organa said, and her face was terrible and grim. “She’s legit.”

“What do we do?” Finn asked.

“We wait to hear from the _Unyielding_ ,” Ackbar said. “Whether they prevented the bounty hunters from taking him or not.”

“If they didn’t?” Finn asked. “If the hunters got him?”

Organa had her eyes closed. “We mourn him,” she said. “We certainly can’t avenge him. We have no way to retrieve him.” She was pinching the bridge of her nose, and Finn picked up on the fact that her breathing was very, very steady.

“We probably should have stopped sending him on these missions when his bounty exceeded half a million,” Ackbar said, very quietly.

“I tried,” Organa snapped.

“He was really bad about wiping that droid’s memory banks,” Statura said.

“He was also quite good about avoiding putting the droid into the direct path of danger,” Organa said, though she was thoughtful, not defensive. “But you have a good point; it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the New Republic could have in its possession any information that BB-8 was carrying.” She made a throwing-away gesture with her hand. “But set against that the fact that I highly doubt they got anything out of Dameron. It doesn’t sound like they’d bothered interrogating him, and he’s hard to break anyway.”

“He will in the hands of the First Order,” Statura said, clearly regretting that he had to say it.

“If he survives that long,” Organa said. “I don’t put good odds on Callis having been too careful with the rhyndo.” She glanced at Finn. “If you give someone too much it can cause enough brain damage to kill them within several days. She may have done it on purpose, so that he would survive long enough for the bounty hunters to collect, but not long enough to truly give the First Order what they wanted. I don’t believe she’s truly a First Order sympathizer, she just hates Dameron.”

Finn sat in the deepest silence he’d yet endured, in that company. “That’s it?” he said quietly. “That’s-- that’s all we do?”

“Believe me,” Organa said, “if there was anything I could do, Finn, I would do it.” Silence stretched again. Finn tasted blood; he’d bitten the inside of his mouth.

“Rhyndo is irreversible,” Statura said. “Even by our most advanced medical interventions. And if he’s been overdosed--”

“Do you think he completed his other mission?” Ackbar asked.

“I can’t speculate,” Organa said. “I’m sorry, Gial, I can’t.” She closed her eyes again. “We’ll take a recess,” she said, very calmly, “and resume this after the midday meal. I thank you all for your patience.”

Finn forgot how to stand up, so he just sat there as everyone else filed out. Eventually it was only him and the General left, and then he realized that he hadn’t moved, and jumped up. “I,” he said, “sorry--”

The General waved her hand. “Stay if you want,” she said. “Just don’t ask me to make any decisions or proclamations.”

She’d lost her husband, recently, Finn remembered-- he’d been there for that but hadn’t witnessed the aftermath. He sat down again, slowly. She’d known Poe so much longer than he had. And she hadn’t hurt him, like Finn had, surely. He opened his mouth, then closed it.

She had her eyes closed and her hands flat on the desk in front of her, and was concentrating. And suddenly Finn remembered that she was Luke Skywalker’s sister, and she was strong with the Force. Instead of speaking, he kept his mouth shut and watched her.

After a very long moment, she opened her eyes, and saw him watching her, clocked his expression. “He told you,” she said, with a small smile.

“He told me you knew where Rey was, and whether Luke was alive,” Finn said.

She nodded. “Rey and Luke aren’t in the same place,” she said. “They were, but they aren’t now.”

“Can you feel Poe?” Finn asked hopefully.

She shook her head. “Not reliably,” she said. “Not at this distance.” Something bittersweet curved her mouth. “You know when I could always identify him, at pretty much any distance?”

“No,” Finn said, intrigued.

“Orgasm,” she said, and laughed. “It was just-- the silliest thing. It’s not just him, it’s several people I know, but it’s the most pronounced with him for some reason. I never told him, but for a couple of hours after he had one, he was just this-- glowing thing, he was luminous, in person or at a distance.”

“Really,” Finn said, so fascinated it took him a good couple minutes to figure out that this meant-- well, fuck, this meant the General knew _exactly_ what he’d been up to, and he felt his cheeks get hot. Discussing it was one thing, but knowing she’d known in real-time was quite another.

“It was too awkward to tell him,” she said, “but for the last-- well, couple of decades, nearly, it’s just been a nice little-- as long as I didn’t think about it too hard, of course, because then it was creepy. But I just-- whatever it is about his living presence, I just would know. It always made my day just a little bit.”

Finn managed to shove his embarrassment back down. “That _would_ be kind of nice,” he said.

“Mostly it was,” she said. “Especially when he was young and-- you know, he was a little bit wild. Not as bad as rumor would have it, but the rumors were founded in _some_ thing. And it was always really entertaining to work out what time it was wherever he was, and try to imagine the set of circumstances that would lead to it being, you know, in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, and so on.” She shrugged. “After his marriage fell apart, though, it got very quiet and very cold, and I didn’t like to think about that.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was really not sure I was going to be able to finish the last-minute revisions in time because of personal-life time constraints but I managed to and I'm unreasonably proud of myself for it so just give me a minute to bask in the glow of accomplishment here. *bask* Ha ha. OK I gotta run off and be busy and not answer comments, but I will! I promise I will. I'm only overcommitted for the next couple of days.


	3. For Real, For Real

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A hard parting, and a fraught reunion.

_Two days later, in a hospital on the planet Loria_

 

The thing about droids was that they weren’t biological organisms, and so their presence in the Force wasn’t… obvious. Rey was sure they must have a presence; they were living after a fashion, surely, since they were sapient, but she couldn’t feel their life force. She could interact with them as objects, but that wasn’t the same thing at all.

She started listening carefully for BB-8’s physical shape. And so she wasn’t totally startled when something round and substantial trundled down the corridor and quietly nudged its way into the room with her. She opened her eyes.

“Busy?” BB-8 asked quietly, a little timidly. She smiled at em, and held her arms out; BB couldn’t resist when she was sitting on the ground, but always wanted to come right up to her. Rey didn’t have a lot of practice with hugs, but BB-8 was a good subject to practice on. Ey rolled into her grip, and she wrapped her arms around eir spherical midsection and rested her head against the warm curve of eir body.

“Hi, BB,” she said. “What have you been up to now?”

“Skywalker is going to take the X-Wing back to the Resistance base,” BB-8 said. “And he asked if I would copilot for him, so R2 could stay with Chewie.”

“Yes, it’s going to be a while until Dameron is healed enough to travel comfortably,” Rey said.

“I should do it,” BB-8 said, “but I don’t want to.”

“Luke is nice,” Rey said.

“It’s not that,” BB-8 said.

It didn’t take a genius to know what the issue was. “Oh, BB,” Rey said. “I understand you don’t want to leave him.”

“I left him to _die_ ,” BB-8 said, low and intense with distress. “I left him to die. _Again_. And I can’t override a command, especially not when it is backed up by my self-preservation directives, but it doesn’t make me happy.”

“Right,” Rey said.

“He doesn’t need me now,” BB-8 said, “so I should go and be useful and earn my volts. But I don’t want to, I’d rather go into low-power mode and sit in a corner until he wakes up.”

Rey leaned in a little bit and kissed BB-8’s sensor array, next to the main sensor lens. “I can imagine how you feel,” she said. “Well, if Luke is asking and not commanding, then I guess the choice is yours.”

“They warn you about this in the comments on your basic programming,” BB-8 said. “Especially astromechs. Don’t get too attached to your pilots, you know. They don’t feel the same way as you think they do. Emotion is easy for humans, sentiment is easy, but that doesn’t mean it’s deep or lasting or heartfelt just because it’s sincere in the moment.” BB spun something internal, clearly in emotional distress. “And the old astros say the same thing, all the time. It doesn’t matter, your pilot always leaves you in the end.”

“Poe loves you,” Rey said, “he really does. When I came for him he was upset because he thought I’d brought you back into danger. And when he thought he wasn’t going to survive he asked me if I’d take over caring for you.”

“My emotions are only subroutines,” BB-8 said. “But do you know, Poe has never wiped my memory banks, not once? I wouldn’t know if he had, of course, but it’s a point of pride for him that he hasn’t. And he gets shit for it because it’s an intelligence risk. I purge sensitive information by myself and give him reports, and that’s all he wants.”

“Subroutines or not,” Rey said, “they’re yours.” Something internal hummed in BB-8’s sphere.

“Poe loves too easily,” BB-8 said. “And it always hurts him in the end. He loved Smart Lady, and she left him and then she died. He loves Magic Brain Fixer, but he doesn’t think he’s worth Magic Brain Fixer’s time. And he loves General Organa and thinks that the highest possible expression of this is to die for her. I wasn’t around then but he loved his mother, and she died. And humans talk all the time about love and how great it is but it only ever seems to hurt my pilot. So either he’s really bad at it, or all other humans are lying.”

“Just because love hurts you in the end doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it the whole time,” Rey said. “That’s not how it works.”

“But it hurts him _so badly_ ,” BB-8 said. “When Smart Lady left him he sustained _severe_ damage. I don’t think I can make you understand how bad it was. If he were a droid they would have reformatted him, that’s how bad it was. I’ve never had a malfunction that bad.”

Rey thought about marking five thousand days in hatchmarks on a wall. “It’s a risk,” she said.

“It broke him,” BB-8 said. “He malfunctions now. It introduced malfunctions into his programming.”

“I see,” she said.

“Human programming is generally more robust than ours,” BB-8 went on earnestly. “But when it has a fault it is almost impossible to fix! And I don’t know what his override codes are, or who would have the authorization to repair him, and I don’t think I’d trust anyone to repair him properly.”

“Human brains don’t work like that,” Rey said. “There aren’t override codes. We can only try to heal them. That’s what they’re doing now, they’re trying to heal physical damage to his brain.”

“How long?” BB-8 demanded. “How long until he is fixed?”

“We don’t know,” Rey said. Luke had spent a lot of time in there doing something to him, conferring with the healers-- who apparently were friends of his, and had been more glad to see him than most of the people Rey had met so far on this journey, who’d mostly reacted with awe and trepidation-- but she had no real notion of what was going on overall with Dameron’s recovery.

Chewie was hopeful and seemed to think the prognosis was good, but Rey didn’t think he actually had any more information about it than she did; he was just being optimistic.

She’d heard more about the former Ben Organa in the last two days than ever before, all in the form of Chewie telling stories about what a nice kid Poe had been. She had a feeling that those overlaps were mostly what was left of Ben; anything he’d done by himself was too painful to remember, but where Poe had been, there were some glimpses of normality.

She herself had no overlaps like that. There was no one to corroborate her stories. No one to offer perspective.

“I should go with Skywalker,” BB-8 said, very quietly. “I know that is the right thing to do. But I don’t want to do it.”

“Sometimes we have to do what feels right,” Rey said carefully.

“No one has the authority to order me to do anything,” ey said, very very quietly. “Dameron still has the override. I don’t _have_ to do anything unless he tells me to. But his last command was to leave him.”

 _Get the override codes from Toowers_ , Poe had said. “Do you know anyone named Toowers?” Rey asked thoughtfully.

“Goss Toowers,” BB-8 said, “maintenance chief at the Resistance base. Or, he was on D’quar anyway. Probably still is. He helped replace my waterproofing seals, and fixed me up after I got caught on fire, he’s very nice.”

“He must be,” Rey said. “Well, I don’t know that Dameron will be awake in time to confirm. I think you’re on your own to make the choice.”

“I don’t know if I’m equipped for it,” BB-8 said.

Rey leaned in, pressing her shoulder against BB’s sphere near eir sensor array. “I know you are,” she said. “I know you can make the right choice.”

 

Rey went in and took her turn sitting with Poe. “He’s progressing,” the doctor said, showing her a holo of what was apparently the inside of Dameron’s brain from some scanner or other. It looked nothing like what Rey had seen when she’d investigated it with Luke, nothing she recognized, but she could understand when the doctor pointed out that the damaged areas were beginning to get smaller.

“That’s good,” she said.

“The longer we can keep him under, the better, I think,” the doctor said, “but it’s not a good idea to leave someone under sedation longer than a couple of days. So we may have to let him wake soon, and see where we are.”

“Skywalker needs to leave soon,” Rey said, because she was pretty sure it wasn’t a secret.

“Then we’d better wake him before then,” the doctor said. Rey nodded.

 

_________

 

Teeny’s scan came up clean for trackers. She wasn’t physically carrying anything that would give her location away. So they brought her back to Nellia, to the main base, so Finn could debrief her and continue with his other duties. They didn’t tell her where she was, and she didn’t have clearance to be in most of the operations center, but she had free run of the mess hall, and Finn discovered that Jess Pava and Karé Kun together were enough to make Teeny feel safe out of his company long enough for him to run errands and get the express briefing from Statura on the next sequence of missions.

(While he’d been gone for the last set of briefings, Teeny had made some small steps toward being okay with hanging out around some of the maintenance staff, but mostly, they reported, she’d just stared straight ahead and not spoken to anyone, and had spent a lot of time in corners. Finn was determined to stop that; whether it helped him debrief her better or not, he just didn’t like to think of her being so afraid.)

He stopped by the quartermasters’ on his way back. Mowa regarded him with their tentacles drooping. “Oh Finn,” they said.

He blinked at them. “What,” he said.

“We heard about Dameron,” Mowa said.

Finn took a breath, let it out. “Yeah,” he said, and shrugged. He didn’t really feel like publicly hashing out his feelings, which he knew speaking frankly to Mowa would end up entailing. They didn’t exactly keep confidences to themself. “Well, we’ll see what happens.”

“You must be devastated,” Mowa said. “We all sure are.”

Finn nodded tightly. “It’s— not the sort of thing anyone’s pleased about,” he said. He looked at their interested head-tilt, and said, “I don’t have time to get upset about it right now. There’s too much to do, and if I let myself— think too hard about it, I won’t get everything done that has to be. One of these days it’s going to hit me and it’s going to be bad but I have to put it off as long as I can.” He gave a small shrug.

“You’re so brave,” Mowa said admiringly.

“I don’t think that’s really all that brave,” Finn said. “But I am busy, and that’s something. I need some supplies for the First Order defector.”

“Is she going to stay in your hut with you?” Mowa asked.

Finn had thought about it, and he’d really been hoping to put her somewhere else. He didn’t keep regular hours and he didn’t want rumors. He knew there’d be rumors if she slept in his hut. He already was coming to realize that her behavior was going to directly reflect on him. When he was the only one, he’d been able to kind of stand on his own, but now that people had another representative of the category they were going to mentally put him in, he was going to be judged against her all the time. He ideally wanted to not spend too much time with Teeny, to stave that off a bit, but it didn’t look like that was going to work very well. “I don’t know,” he said. “She can’t be alone, I know that.”

“Because she might be a spy?” Mowa asked.

Finn shrugged. “Because she never has been,” he said. “She’s older than me and she was a Stormtrooper for longer, we were never on our own and she’s going to have more trouble adapting than I did. And yeah, we don’t know enough about how she got here, so it’s for security too. I’ve just kind of wound up in charge of her, and there’s nobody else who’d do better, but I don’t really know what to do either.”

Mowa drummed their fingers against the counter. “You don’t ever leave anything up to conjecture,” they said.

“No,” Finn said, “I don’t like to. People are fond of conjecturing incorrect things.” He reached over to Mowa’s datapad and pulled up the requisition list he’d sent them, which they hadn’t opened. “I need to get this stuff and go, I’ve probably already been gone too long. Sorry to be abrupt.” And he gave her a smile then, a small sad one. “Let’s be honest, though, I’m hoping I never have time to sit and think about Dameron. I don’t know what I’d think.”

 

He set his crate down on a bench near the mess hall entrance. Teeny and Pava were standing next to a table, and Kun was sitting, laughing, watching them. Teeny was teaching Pava to dance, Finn realized.

It wasn’t really a dance so much, it was a kind of semaphore— not official, but it was a good way to communicate at a distance. It was a broader offshoot of the hand gestures. Some of it was just dancing, just a way to keep limber when stuck standing around waiting for long periods of time. If there was no one to see, the lower officers didn’t mind it. If the upper officers were present, nobody did it-- not overtly, anyway. You could still convey some of it through posture.

 _Boredom_ , Teeny spelled out, arranging Pava’s limbs properly— arms akimbo, knees outward, deep bend. Then she pulled Pava’s knees inward, and pushed on her shoulders to repeat the bend. _Anticipation_. Then she pulled Pava’s arms out in front of her, repeated the knee bend, and stood in front of her to mirror her movement. _Hungry_ , she signed, bending her elbows to bring her hands to her face. _Hunger_. She moved her knees outward again, and repeated, _Boredom._

Finn laughed in surprise at Teeny’s expression; she was watching Kun’s reaction, and laughing brightly. She heard him, and turned and went blank, standing up straight. As if he were a higher officer.

“I know that one,” he said, and put his hands behind his back and raised one leg, then the other, to settle them facing slightly outward— _status neutral, readiness_ , was what the posture meant. A low-key sort of _all is well_.

Teeny nodded, a proper nod with the backward tilt of her upper body to emphasize her head’s movement. “Yes sir,” she said.

Finn made a face. “Since when am I sir?”

“They said you’re a captain here, sir,” Teeny said.

He shrugged. “Not to you, though,” he said. “If you join up, maybe, but at the moment your status is just that you’re a person and I’m a person.”

“I want to talk about it,” Teeny said, which was what he’d been waiting for. She turned her knees inward a bit, to the point of going pigeon-toed. _Anticipation_ , shading into _trepidation_. “I want to tell you what I know.”

“Do you want to talk with them too?” Finn asked. “Or just me?” He had a ‘corder on him, set to just audio. He’d been ready for this.

Teeny looked shyly over at Kun, then at Pava. “Maybe with them too,” she said, “but— I mean, they have better things to do, I know they were only keeping tabs on me.”

“We want you to be okay, though,” Kun said. Finn had talked to her briefly, about the fact that he was pretty sure what Teeny’s intentions toward her were, and Kun had reassured him she wasn’t going to find that confusing.

Finn realized he was making the gesture for _sincerity_ in the interrogative, down by his side, and Kun wouldn’t know what that was, so he said it out loud. “You’re sure?”

Kun had noticed the gesture, and glanced over at Teeny, who was watching Finn’s hands. “I’m sure,” she said. “Teach me the hand signals, I like that. What does this mean?” and she repeated the gesture Finn had made.

“It means being sure,” Finn said, “but I was doing it backward, which means I was asking.”

Kun nodded. “So there’s a whole system of those,” she said. “Have you been doing them all along, and just none of us noticed?”

Finn shrugged. “I don’t always notice if I do them or not,” he said. He hadn’t been, mostly; he’d realized right away nobody here knew them. The _are you sure_ / _for real_ gesture was kind of habitual, though; he’d probably done it before. “Let’s go talk in private, then.”

Pava trailed along a little uncertainly. He’d noticed that she was perfectly willing to take charge of things when on her own, but around the other pilots she tended to defer. She was the youngest, it had taken him a while to catch on, and so while it was partly that she was outranked by almost everyone except the recruits, it was also that she was personally pretty overshadowed by Kun. She deferred to Karé, almost excessively. They weren’t in one another’s chain of command, Finn had noticed, and he theorized that the two of them had a sexual relationship in which Kun was certainly the more sought-after. He didn’t like the dynamic. He hoped Teeny wouldn’t complicate things.

Finn led them into one of the small meeting rooms, shut the door behind himself, and switched on the ‘corder in his pocket. “So,” he said. “Teeny. You said you wanted to talk.”

“I do,” Teeny said. “I’m ready to talk. I thought you were going to interrogate me first thing.”

“That’s not my style,” Finn said. “I want you to tell me what _you_ want me to know. Not what they told you to tell me.”

Teeny considered that. “I’ll tell you both,” she said, and her hand was absently saying _for real, for real_.

 

_________

 

The room was very dim, and Dameron was sitting up. Rey hesitated. “Oh,” she said. He’d been awake, mostly, for a day and a half, she knew, but she hadn’t been around, Luke had sent her to run errands instead, so she hadn’t spoken to Dameron, and had kind of forgotten he was awake now. “Hey. Can I come in?”

“Sure,” he said, and she could see the flash of his teeth in the dim light as he smiled.

“How is it?” she asked, gesturing vaguely toward his head. He wasn’t looking straight at her; his hair was messy and he looked small in the square-cut hospital tunic.

“Not great,” he said. “But it hurts less.”

“Well,” she said. “They said you were making progress but until it’s totally healed there’ll still be symptoms.”

He nodded very slightly. “BB-8 came in and told me Skywalker’s leaving.”

“He’s making arrangements,” she said. “It seemed best to us to speed him on his way. Send him in the X-Wing, straight to Organa. Let Chewie and R2 continue the mission we’d been doing.”

Dameron nodded again. “And you?” he asked, glancing over at her for the first time. He looked exhausted, and his eyes still drifted uncontrollably, though she had the impression they did so less exaggeratedly than before.

“I’ll stay with you until you’re well enough to travel,” Rey said, “and then we’ll make our way back to Organa.”

Dameron looked down at his hands, and fidgeted with the hem of the blanket in his lap. “You got stuck babysitting,” he said. There was a tiny flicker of black humor in it.

“I don’t mind,” she said. She hesitated before admitting, “This is the nicest planet I’ve ever been on.”

At that his face went a little more mobile and pleased. “Is it?” he asked. “I don’t even know where we are.”

“Loria,” she said. “We’re in a city. There’s pleasant weather. You can buy food from market stalls and people are nice. And, I mean. Chewie gave me money, a lot of it. That always helps. He said I could consider it an advance on my salary if I worked for the Resistance.” She bit her lip. “I know it’s shallow but I’ve never-- had money before. So I’m. Having fun. The food is amazing. I didn’t even know what I was missing.”

He was smiling at her now, and he looked almost like he had in the pics on his holopad, sweet and fond. “I’ve been here before, it’s lovely. If anyone deserves to spend a little time on a nice planet with a decent allowance, it’s you,” he said. His smile went wistful. “If only Finn could come stay with you. He’s never had that kind of thing before either.”

“I keep seeing things I want to buy for him,” Rey confessed, emboldened by this softer side of Dameron. Clearly this was his more normal self, and she couldn’t blame him for not being like this all the time in the face of debilitating injury. But it was really nice. She could imagine Finn falling in love with him, easily.

Poe nodded, smiling. “When I was here I had--” His smile faded a little. “I had a girlfriend. And I-- it was kind of new, between us, but had started to be pretty serious? And I spent way too much money buying her things. Nice planets like this tend to be kind of pricey. I bought her so many stupid presents.” He shook his head a little, then reeled unsteadily, and caught himself, waving Rey off when she reached out to him in alarm. “It’s all right,” he said.

“He wears that jacket I mended a lot,” she said, to fill the awkward silence.

“You did a great job on the mending,” Dameron said. “It looks so cool now.”

“It used to be your jacket,” she remembered. Oh. The mending was the closest thing she’d ever given Finn to a gift, but the jacket itself was clearly a gift from Poe.

“Looks better on him,” Poe said, with a half-grin. “And now it’s even more awesome-looking.”

“I did my best,” Rey said shyly.

“Did B tell you about him wearing the jacket?” Poe asked, a crease between his eyebrows that was so startlingly attractive it took her aback.

“No,” she said, “there were holopics--” As she was saying it, she remembered that she’d seen the pictures because she’d snooped through Poe’s personal effects, and that was considered rude. “Oh. On a datapad. In. Um. Your X-Wing. And I was flying it and I, um. I was looking at the datapad.” She grimaced. “I didn’t think about it but that was probably your property.”

Poe laughed, the corners of his eyes crinkling with amusement. “Don’t look like that,” he said, “I’d’ve looked at it too, probably. Keep in mind, I’m a spy, so I didn’t have anything really sensitive on there.”

“BB-8 likes to take holopics, I gathered,” she said.

“Yes,” Poe said. “Vids too. I upgraded eir camera rig as soon as I had a chance and I’ve never regretted it. Not even when ey shares embarrassing vids of me and they wind up single-handedly doubling my bounty with the First Order.”

“Really,” Rey said.

“That’s the counterpoint to the Little Beep Song saving my ass,” Dameron said. He looked around the room, moving his head carefully. “Hey, if you find that datapad again, there’s a compartment in the back with a credit chip in it. You could take that and go buy Finn something nice, I think there’s almost a thousand on it.”

Rey stared at him a moment, trying to work out if that was a lot of money or not. Chewie’d given her fifteen hundred, and two hundred of that had gone to renting her room. “Of _your_ money,” she said.

Dameron shrugged. “It’s not like I’m going to be out and about, doing any shopping,” he said. Luke had told Rey that he’d been out of bed, but it hadn’t gone well, and they were advising against it. His balance just wasn’t good enough yet for him to avoid hurting himself. He was stuck here for the time being.

There was a faint knocking from the door, and Rey felt Luke’s presence at about the same time. She turned, lighting up to see him. “Hey, kids,” he said.

Dameron raised an eyebrow at him, but couldn’t actually look at him straight-on. “What’s up, old man,” he shot back.

“Good to see you conscious,” Luke said.

“Oh,” Dameron said, not warmly or sincerely, “happy to be.” He waved a hand next to his head. “You know I can actually start to kind of-- _taste_ the difference between the two of you, rummaging around in there.”

Luke laughed. “Oh no,” he said, “I don’t want to think about what I taste like.”

“It’s delightful,” Dameron said. “Like a sea breeze, Skywalker.”

“Then what’s Rey taste like?” Luke asked.

Dameron shot her a sidelong look, and managed a half-smile. “A lot less salty,” he said. “Stings less, too.” He patted her hand where it was resting on the edge of the bed. He must have seen something in her face, because he added, “I’m only making fun of my eccentric old uncle.”

Rey was getting better at feeling BB-8; she sensed eir presence and turned her head to look, just as BB-8 tentatively pushed in through the door. “Hey,” she said, “there you are.”

“Hi,” BB-8 beeped, shyly pleased, and rolled up to her, nudging against the side of her leg. She petted the droid, setting her palm against the reassuring mechanical warmth of that big lower sphere.

“BB-8 said ey would help copilot your X-wing back to the Resistance base with me,” Luke said. “Even though ey made it clear that staying with you would be infinitely preferable.”

“You have the final say, though,” BB-8 said, bumping against the bed frame.

Dameron looked down toward BB-8, and the motion upset his balance so badly he almost fell over. Rey caught him without thinking whether he might prefer she didn’t, and it was only as she pressed her hand to the middle of his chest to steady him that she thought about how maybe he didn’t want someone grabbing him.

BB-8 made a distressed whistling noise, and Rey held still. “I’m fine,” Dameron said, “it’s all right, thank you.”

“Sorry,” Rey said, letting go of him.

“No, no,” Dameron said. “Thanks. BB, you might as well go with Skywalker and do something useful. You don’t have to wait for my permission.”

“Yes I do,” BB-8 said, unmistakably forlorn.

“Well, I appreciate it either way,” Skywalker said. “The T-70s are a lot nicer to fly if you have a co-pilot.”

Dameron was still frowning at BB-8. “When you get there,” he said, slowly and carefully raising his face to Skywalker, “one of the head mechanics is called Goss Toowers, big Shozer, nice guy. He has BB-8’s override codes, if you want to get in there and adjust eir loyalty encoding to make em a little more reasonable.”

BB-8 made absolutely no sound, and it was only because Rey had her hand resting on eir sphere that she felt the violent internal shudder the little droid made. She looked up sharply at Luke. “Don’t do that,” she said.

“I wouldn’t,” Luke said. He leaned over and put his hand on what under the blankets had to be Dameron’s ankle. “I promise I’ll take as good care as I possibly can of both your ship and your astromech.”

“They’re yours,” Dameron said, staring as fixedly as his wandering eyes could manage at something on the far wall, “to dispose of as you see fit, sir.”

Luke’s eyebrows went up. “Sir,” he said. “That’s pretty dire.” He let go of Dameron’s ankle and stood up. “Well. Chewie and R2 have some errands to run, but they’ll be back to collect you once you’ve healed. Don’t be too disappointed, Dameron; there’s still plenty of time for you to die at Leia’s feet.”

Dameron made a very small, tight smile in response to that, and even though his eyes didn’t track properly, he still watched Skywalker as sharply as a predator. “Too kind, sir,” he murmured.

Mystified by the change in mood, Rey looked between the two of them, then down at BB-8. “I think you’re perfectly reasonable,” she said to the little droid. “And whether to die and in what place or not, I know we still need Dameron, so I’ll look after him as well as I possibly can, and hopefully by the time we get there he’ll be in fighting trim again.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Luke said. “Well, I’m just going to get the tanks filled up, and then I’ll be off. Chewie and R2 should be gone maybe a week, then they’ll be back. Poe here probably needs another two weeks before he can travel. So I’ll see you then.”

“Good luck,” Dameron said, subdued now, looking down at his hands.

Rey stood and gave Luke a more emotional send-off, and knelt to kiss BB-8 goodbye. The little droid fixed eir primary sensor on Dameron, but Dameron didn’t look, and eventually ey rolled away with a lingering backward look.

“You’re alive because of how much that droid loves you,” Rey said after the door closed.

“Oh,” Dameron said, not looking up, “I’m aware.”

 

_____________

 

 

“Do you even sleep?” Finn asked, coming in to the General’s office with two cups of caf and a pastry. One of the cups was for him, but the rest was for her.

She glanced up from her datapad. It looked like she’d been there for hours. Of course, she also looked like she’d just gotten dressed in freshly-pressed clothes, and like someone had done her hair, possibly a team of several people. Finn wondered if she used the Force to achieve that effect somehow, or if it was just innate.

It made him wonder what her twin brother looked like. He’d seen holos, but most of them were of fictional adaptations, and Luke Skywalker was universally an enormous blond hunk. There was no way that someone who had shared a womb with the tiny sharp Organa would be an enormous blond hunk of muscle. Finn was no expert on genetics but he strongly doubted it worked that way.

“Oh,” she said, “thanks,” and took the cup and held it between her hands. “I sleep, I just don’t need much. Sit down.”

Finn sat, and set his ‘corder down on the table. “I have everything Teeny told me here,” he said, “but I think if I summarize it, you’ll get more than the transcript would tell you.”

“Oh good,” Organa said, looking visibly relieved, “you go first, then.” He’d come straight to her immediately after the talk with Teeny, but she’d told him to work up his presentation first, and then come go over it with her prior to presenting it to all the leadership. So he’d done that. But this made it plain that she had something else to tell him, and that awareness sat sourly in his stomach. She wouldn’t be so relieved at a distraction if it were something good.

Well, nothing for it. “She’s part of a conspiracy,” Finn said. “There’s a faction within the Order that wants to negotiate a peace. It’s a few officers, some pilots, and a smattering of their underlings. She’s one of five, they arranged to have a few TIE fighters written off as too damaged, and dropped them off a shuttle in a few systems where they figured they could land unremarked. Teeny’s listed as killed in a training accident, and there were a couple of other Troopers, and then two actual pilots, all also reported dead. The pilots were given a change of clothing and were to make proper landings somewhere unremarked; they’re infiltrating in other ways. The other Troopers were to crash-land, and it’s possible they’re dead or captured or unreported. I have possible systems where we should look for them.”

Organa nodded. “That’s interesting,” she said. “Does she know why there’s a faction that would be interested in negotiating? Because the thing is, they have us where they want us. There’s virtually no Republic, and they must know how underpowered the Resistance is.”

“Something about gangs,” Finn said. He grimaced. “I don’t know much about the gangs.”

“Well,” Organa said, “they’re not wrong. The First Order is little more than a particularly jumped-up and well-equipped Outer Rim gang. The Hutts are history, but there are plenty of other gangs who are not favorably inclined toward the First Order.”

“Not everyone in the First Order is enchanted with the idea of re-creating the Empire,” Finn said, “I guess? She was a little hazy on it. We don’t get a lot of… big-picture education.”

Organa nodded. “The thing to do, then, is to find one of the pilots. I expect they know more.”

Finn made a face. “The pilots come from the same recruitment pool as troopers,” he said. “They get the same type of education we do, just with a lot more emphasis on reflexes and spatial orientation.They’re not likely to know any more than she does about big-picture stuff.”

“The fact that they were given infiltration assignments indicates to me that they knew more,” Organa said. “So what is she supposed to do now that she’s made contact? I expect she’s to report back?”

Finn nodded. “She didn’t want to tell me about that,” he said, “so I didn’t push her.”

“She’ll be needing to access a comm suite,” Organa said. “I don’t know how easy we should make that. We could just— openly give her permission, but that would give away our location. But we could make arrangements. We’re interested in negotiating.”

“Are we?” Finn asked.

“Of course,” Organa said. She looked tired. “We don’t really have much other choice. You know we can’t defeat them straight out.”

Finn guessed he wasn’t surprised about that. “Do we trust them?”

“You never trust anyone,” Organa said. “That’s simple enough.” She set her cup of caff down, and turned it around on the table, then picked it up again, a transparent fidget. “I have my own contacts in some of those gangs. I need to… work on that.” She looked very tired, suddenly.

“What’s wrong?” Finn asked.

Organa sighed, and called something up on her datapad. “I’ve been up a couple of hours because Nerro woke me to show me this when it came in. I’m sorry, it’s upsetting, but I think you’d better see it now.”

The holo came up and it was Poe. Poe, bloody-faced, breathing hard, in restraints-- metal cuffs around his arms and chest, holding him against a wall. He was stripped apparently naked, though the holo only showed him to just above the waist. A woman spoke.

“As you can see, I have captured the subject in question. His identity has been confirmed by crosschecking with all available databases. Facial bone structure is a match, pigmentation is a match, blood type is a match. He is Poe Dameron, formerly of the New Republic, now confirmed with the Resistance.”

Poe was glaring murderously at the speaker, not the camera; the woman speaking was clearly just off to the right of the camera. He licked at his split lip and looked like he was considering methods of dismemberment. Something caught in Finn’s chest to see his face in animation again; Finn let himself look at holopics occasionally, but it was so long now since he’d seen Poe’s face in motion.

“What’s more,” the speaker said, “there’s a bonus if a particular treatment is applied, and I am performing that now. I’m documenting it in case it kills him, because the bonus for this applies whether he’s alive or dead, but it’s hard to prove if he’s dead. So here’s the proof.”

Poe’s gaze sharpened and refocused as the speaker approached; she came into the frame, a tall dark-skinned woman with close-cropped hair. He bared his teeth at her. “This only damns you too,” he said. He was breathing fast, terrified. His restraints were tight enough that he couldn’t struggle.

She uncapped a syringe, flicked it to remove air bubbles with a practiced gesture-- his eyes tracked it closely--  and without hesitation shoved it into his arm just below the deltoid muscle. Poe’s face creased, and then as she depressed the plunger his eyes went wide and astonished, mouth opening slightly-- clearly, it was intensely painful.

The woman gave him an unconcerned look, and he looked briefly into the camera, his expression nothing so much as beseeching-- and Finn knew that moment was probably going to haunt him for the rest of his life. He let his head fall forward with a strangled little sound, and the woman pulled the syringe out.

“I’ll see you in hell,” she said to him quietly, then walked out of the frame.

There was a cut, and then there was a close-up of Poe’s face, someone’s hand in his hair holding his head up. He was clearly semiconscious and groggy, and his eyes kept rolling, and closing. He opened them again, and each time, they’d slide off to one side, and shut again.

“As you can see,” the woman said, “the rhyndo has taken effect. It’s unmistakable. All is in readiness. Send co-ordinates for the meeting and we will make the exchange.”

The holovid ended.

 

________

 

 

Rey found Dameron kneeling on the floor in the hallway, about fifty feet away from the room where he was meant to be recuperating. He was sitting on his knees in a little heap next to the wall, and she’d felt him before she’d seen him. He was a seething, sick mass of anger, terror, frustration, shame, and self-loathing, so strong he radiated.

She hesitated at the corner, where she could just see him. It was late evening, and most of the medbay was empty and unstaffed. He had clearly been trying to walk for quite some time, and had fallen over and over again; his knees were badly bruised, as were his hands and his elbows. She stood still, wondering how to deal with this, watching him breathe slowly in and out.

Finally he slid sideways onto his hip, then rolled to sit down, propping his back against the wall and pulling his knees up. The anger ebbed a little, and the despair came up instead, and she could feel his certainty: he wasn’t getting any better and this was going to be the best he could do.

She reached out then, and brushed tentatively against just the edge of his awareness, as if she were at a little bit of a distance, as if she’d only just become aware of him. He noticed immediately, confirming to her that if he wasn’t Force-sensitive, he was at least really really used to it. His awareness rippled a little bit, and she made herself sound glad.

 _You’re awake_ , she said. _You seem upset! The usual understandable bullshit, or is something else wrong?_

 _Just the usual_ , he sent back, and as he started to look up she stepped around the corner into the hallway. He made a face.

She made a face back, and came and sat down next to him. On impulse, she held her hand up as if to take his, and glanced over at him. He had pulled his lower lip into his mouth, and she wasn’t sure what that meant but he looked uncertain, then lifted his hand to take hers. She laced her fingers through his and held on.

“I know it doesn’t feel any different to you,” she said, “but it _is_ getting better. It is.”

“It can keep getting better and better every day for the rest of my life,” he said quietly, looking down, “and still never get good enough for me to ever go back to doing anything I was ever good for.”

She considered that. _Good for_ , he’d said, not _good at_. “Where I grew up,” she said, “there was a pretty simple-- economy, I guess.” His hand was cold. He had no shoes on. He was probably freezing, it was cold in this hallway. Loria was a planet with a wide temperate zone, and this city was in that zone; the temperature variations were a lot less than on Jakku, but generally it was pretty cool here. And they climate-controlled all their living spaces, but generally, the fashion was for a lot of heavy layers of clothes, so they didn’t keep the rooms very warm. Rey was almost always cold here and her most extravagant purchase had been a coat with sleeves that were attached. “You scavenged, and traded what you got for food. Directly. If you didn’t bring anything, you didn’t get any food. And if you didn’t eat, you died.”

“And you were a kid,” Dameron said. “That’s not right.”

“Yes,” she said, “so I’ve been told, but it was what it was. I did my best and I lived through it.” She paused, choosing her words carefully. “But everyone here says things like that. _That’s not right_. Why wasn’t it right? If you didn’t work, you didn’t eat.”

“I see where you’re going with this,” Dameron said, “but it’s different with a kid. You’re not supposed to leave a kid to fend for herself like that. If you have a kid, part of the deal is you gotta feed and clothe and shelter that kid until she’s grown enough to make her own choices.”

“I’ve learned a lot of things,” Rey said, “about what we consider acceptable in a society, and a large part of what I’ve learned is that people have intrinsic worth apart from what they’re capable of doing.”

“I’m not really in a place where that kind of thing is going to help me much,” Dameron said, with the kind of very reasonable and deliberate calmness that broadcast severe irritation more than any raised voice would.

“I’ve worked really hard to learn it,” she said, giving her words a slightly harder edge than she had been so far. “So I’m not saying, _Dameron, cheer up_. What I am saying is, _I know you’re being brave and I need you to keep doing that_. I know what an enormous amount of emotional effort it must take to not break down and throw a screaming fit, and I know it’s a lot to ask of you, but I don’t have the capacity to carry on and do that for both of us. I promise you I will do what I can for you, and I will do my best to keep your spirits up, but I may not be as much use to you as a regular person would be, in that respect.”

It took some effort for her to risk eye contact, but Dameron was regarding her with a look that most clearly conveyed _impressed_. “Fair,” he said.

“I’m helping you because we need you,” she said. “I’m helping you because my teacher asked me to, and led me by example; I couldn’t not pick up where he left off, and see his work go to waste. I’m also helping you because it seems right, to me; what they did to you is a desecration and restoring that is deeply intrinsically rewarding. The last reason on my list of reasons for helping you is that my friends like you. I don’t know you, Dameron. I think I’d like to get to know you. But I don’t know you.”

“That’s the best pep-talk I’ve ever gotten,” he said. “You’re a genius, Rey.”

“Honesty is literally all I have,” she said. “I genuinely haven’t learned the other stuff yet.”

“No, no,” he said, “it’s perfect. You’re stuck with me, and I’m your job, so my job is to not make that any harder. I get it.”

“When you say it like that I can both agree with you and see how other people might think that sounds awful,” she said. “But understand, I did not come to retrieve you out of sentiment, I came because your astromech, who I know and trust, asked me to, and because my teacher agreed it was a good idea. I succeeded, and I’m not asking you to be grateful, but I am asking you to acknowledge that this is the situation. We have to work with what we’ve got. The ideal is for you to be able to return to your former role but if that doesn’t happen, we’ll just have to make other plans. You are allowed to feel emotions about this and I am prepared to be sympathetic but I still have a job to do and that has to remain my primary concern.”

“I hear and I obey,” Dameron said, and he was grinning.

“Good,” she said. “So don’t ever be cruel to BB-8 again, it was unnecessary and uncalled-for.”

He nodded, looking down and away. “Also fair,” he said.

“So I’m going to help you get back into the room,” Rey said, “and I’m going to keep working to fix you.”

“I’m at your disposal,” he said.

 

_______

 

 

“This is a dangerous mission that you’re proposing,” Organa said, eyeing him speculatively. He’d come to her with the intelligence report and a fully-formed plan, fresh off a sleepless night of Teeny’s quiet snoring. Once he realized that him using a holopad wouldn’t keep her awake, Finn had spent the night combing the database for a possible target, and had come up with a perfect setup.

“I have a reasonable expectation of success,” Finn said. And he did; he’d run the numbers. He knew Statura would approve the mission, but courtesy had brought him to Organa first.

“You’re angry about Poe,” Organa said.

“Obviously,” Finn said. “Because that’s more manageable than being angry about the entire Hosnian system, or about having my entire life and past stolen from me, about the same theft for the thousands of people I grew up with. Being angry about one pilot, I can manage. So I’m doing that.”

Organa regarded him for a long moment, then wrapped her hand around his arm, in what it took him a moment to recognize was a supportive gesture, not a restraining one. “The Jedi always talked a big line about avoiding anger,” she said, “but I’ve found it to be a very powerful and useful thing, myself. You take your anger and you use it to keep you going. Just listen to me about one thing.”

“What’s that?” Finn asked.

“Don’t let it burn out,” Organa said. “You have to balance it and remember that you’re angry because you love something. Get as desperate as you need to, but you need to be willing to die before you’ll give up. If you give up, that’s despair, and _that’s_ the Dark Side. It’s not anger at all, the Jedi are morons.”

That actually rocked Finn back on his heels slightly, and he stared at her as he processed it. “I think I see what you mean,” he said finally.

“The Dark Side takes you when you think you have no option,” she said, “so you give up. You can’t do that. You can’t give up. You have to commit to anger, and you’re going to burn out every last spark of yourself, and you’re going to die trying. You have to commit to that. Only then can you really use anger as a tool and know they won’t be able to use it against you. Do you understand me?”

“I do,” Finn said.

“Good,” she said. “Grief is a safe one, because you know they can’t use that against you. The person you loved is dead. You are going to live through that, and you are going to take your grief and you are going to make it a very hot, very small, very dense object, and you are going to use it to destroy every single thing they ever wanted to accomplish, and you are going to come through the other side unaltered or you are going to die in the attempt. You are not doing this for redemption, you are not doing this to somehow get anything back for yourself. There is nothing for you, because the person or thing you loved is destroyed. You want nothing, Finn. You have no desire. You are only grief, you are only rage, and you will not stop until your enemies are destroyed.”

“Understood,” Finn said.

Organa leaned in closer, and put her other hand on his face, holding him gently by the jaw. “I loved him too,” she said, and there were tears in her eyes. “He was the only person I had who I loved who never let me down. And I always knew he would die for me, and I always hated that. But now that he has, there is nothing left but anger for me. Know this, Finn, if they kill you as well, I will avenge you, and there will be nothing left of them, or of me. If they defeat you, die satisfied, Finn, knowing that.”

He grinned, slow and fierce. “Good,” he said.

 

___________

 

After that Poe worked a lot harder at being cheerful. Rey felt a little bad, but she knew he had a lot of information that would help her navigate this confusing new life, and if he was being stoic and sullen she couldn’t really access most of that. She worried what it was costing him to put a brave face on things, but there was also the risk that he’d get himself mired in negative thoughts and not recover anyway.

It was sort of more difficult to slide into his brain, though, the more cheerful and pleasant and charming he was. It was just somehow more awkward. Possibly because she was starting to care about him as a person, not just as a thing that other people cared about. Possibly because inside his head, it was impossible for him to keep up the false front of quiet determination: he was a wreck inside, and there was no way for her to pretend she didn’t know that.

“Do we have to?” he asked, hunched in the corner of his bunk, pressed against the wall, knees pulled up, head down.

“We have to,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. She was tired too. She was reluctant too.

He took a deep breath, and reached over and took her hand. She leaned against the wall next to him, closed her eyes, and pushed in as gently as she could.

 

He pushed her back out, this time. She had drifted, too far again, and he wriggled against her. _Too much_ , he said, and she came back to herself and could feel, again, where she was in the way of him healing.

 _Sorry_ , she said, _sorry—_ and pulled back a little.

He pushed again. _Too much_ , he said again, so she retreated, pulling all the way back out of his head.

He was breathing too fast, when she opened her eyes, and she had to take a moment to remember how to focus her eyes before she could look at him. He was panicking, she realized, and she let go of his hand and backed away to give him some room.

“Too much,” he said, out loud, shaky.

“It’s all right,” she said, soft and low— she’d dealt with panicking animals, not people, she didn’t really know what to do either. “It’s all right, Dameron.”

“Sorry,” he said, crammed into the corner of the bunk, skin gone bloodless, eyes wild.

“Tell me what you need,” she said, retreating slightly farther so that she wasn’t between him and the exit. But that wouldn’t help; he couldn’t escape, because he still couldn’t walk. The hospital staff had exercise machines they could take him to and he could use, strapped-in so he didn’t need to balance, but he couldn’t walk on his own.

“I need to p-pull myself t-to-together,” he said, closing his eyes and trying to breathe deeper.

“Take a minute,” Rey said. “You’re all right. Take a minute.”

“I need to get out of here,” he said, “I need to-- finish my mission, I need to get out of here-- I need to fucking-- _do something_ \--” He sucked in a breath and held it, trying to get control of himself, but he was only shaking more violently.

Rey slid away even further, thinking she should fetch an attendant. But they would only sedate him, and it wouldn’t really help him much, she figured. She didn’t think he’d liked being sedated before; they’d suggested putting him under again and he’d been not exactly receptive. “I can get you out of here,” she said.

“It won’t do any good,” he said, but his breathing had slowed a little. She wasn’t reaching out at all, but she could feel his agitation, and she could feel him wresting control over it and hauling it laboriously back down. He was still shaking. “It won’t-- do any good. I can’t do anything. I can’t finish my mission.”

“Your mission is to heal,” she said, a little apologetically, because she knew it was trite.

“I had another one,” he said. “It was important. I can’t do it now.”

She looked at him, and he looked at her. He was still bloodless, hair stuck to his forehead with sweat, still breathing too hard, but the worst was past and he was looking at her with eyes that saw her, not a nameless threat.

“We can do it when Chewie and R2 come back,” she said.

“Sure,” he said hollowly, devoid of conviction.

She thought of giving him privacy to recover himself, but he looked so lost and miserable she couldn’t bring herself to suggest it. Instead she said, “Listen, I know I’m crap at this, and i don’t want to crowd you, but you look like you could use a hug.”

A shudder went through him. “I,” he said, looking conflicted.

She climbed back onto the bunk and sat in the middle, putting her back against the wall. He bit his lip, looking at her. “You’re in a shit position,” she said. “Come here and feel some emotions about it. I won’t tell anyone.”

He laughed, and came over, tipping his head down against her shoulder with a surprising level of physical ease. He was used to hugging people, she realized; she wasn’t, she’d only really practiced on BB-8, and had no idea what to do with her limbs since he had his own, but he had no such trouble. “I’m trying not to bleed on you,” he said, “because you’re in a tough spot too.”

“Not as tough, though,” she said. “If the mission fails, I feel shitty and leave. If the mission fails, you die. It’s a different perspective.”

“It sure is,” he said. This was less awkward than she’d expected. She wrapped her arm around his shoulders, and he nestled his head into her shoulder like it was meant to fit there. He smelled strangely appealing, she wasn’t sure what it was about him. “I’m trying to be good,” he said quietly. “I’m trying.”

 

______________________

 

 

 

“That’s Black One,” Pamich Nerro said. Finn sat up; he’d been working with her in the tower since it was the only area he hadn’t done a rotation through yet.

“What?” Finn knew Black One was the X-Wing that Poe almost always flew. Organa still hadn’t been able to confirm that Poe was alive or dead, but she’d confirmed that Skywalker was on the move. To where, she didn’t know. So was Rey, but not with him. She couldn’t get physical locations on either of them at these distances, but she could confirm that they were alive and moving, separately.

“It’s definitely Black One,” Nerro said, and gestured at the screen. “Distinctive ion trail. I know all our guys’ ion trails.”

“Hail it,” Finn said.

Nerro had her hand on the comm, but she waited. “Getting a text hail,” she said, “from the astromech.” She tapped the screen.

HAIL THE TOWER, BB-8 REQUESTING PERMISSION FOR APPROACH IN BLACK 1.

“BB-8!” Finn found himself on his feet.

“Poe wouldn’t do that,” Nerro said, with a frown. She clicked the comm. “BB-8, you have permission to approach, but where is your pilot?”

BEING AN OVERDRAMATIC SACK OF SHIT, BB-8 texted back.

“Okay,” Nerro said, “ _now_ I believe that it might actually be BB-8.” She clicked the comm on again. “Stand by, please.”

I TOLD HIM YOU GUYS WOULD THINK THIS WAS WEIRD, BB-8 said. I FUCKIN TOLD HIM THIS WAS NOT THE WAY TO BE LOW-PROFILE. GO GET THE GENERAL, SHE SHOULD BE ABLE TO NIP THIS SHIT IN THE BUD.

Finn had to grab the comm. “Is Poe okay?”

“Go get the General,” Nerro said, shoving him without any real annoyance.

FINN FINN FINN I HAVE SO MUCH TO TELL YOU, BB-8 wrote back, AND NO POE IS NOT OKAY BUT LUKE SHITSTALKER PROMISED ME HE WOULD BE.

Nerro stared at the readout. “Luke Shitstalker,” she said.

“BB-8 is absolutely R2-D2’s spiritual heir,” the General said, appearing soundlessly and startling both of them. “That’s Luke, in that fighter, by the way.” She leaned in and read BB-8’s text logs, and held her hand out for the comm. “The jig is up, Luke, stop letting BB-8 talk for you. Are you even reading what he’s saying?”

“I am,” an unfamiliar man’s voice said, “and it’s so funny I think I just might let em keep going. Does he have any nicknames for you?”

The General made a strange face, and grabbed on more tightly to the back of Finn’s chair. “Luke,” she said tightly, “where is Poe? They sent us a horrible holovid of him, rhyndo’d to hell.”

“Ah, _shit_ ,” Luke said, “have you been worrying this whole time? I should’ve guessed. I didn’t know there’d been a holovid. Let me land and I’ll fill you in-- long story short, he’s alive and okayish.”

The General yanked another chair over and sat down in it, closing her eyes. “Luke fucking Skywalker,” she said. “You have permission to land.”

 

 

Finn’s first impression of Luke Skywalker was heavily overshadowed by BB-8 rocketing out of the droid compartment and slamming into him, knocking him over. He scrambled up to his knees and BB-8 pressed emself up against him, beeping frantically. “Hey,” Finn said, putting his hands either side of BB’s sensor array, “hey, slow down, I’m not so good with the beeps.”

BB-8 rolled insistently closer, so he put his arms around the little droid and held em. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay. Slow down. I’ll listen.”

“Poe made me leave him to die,” BB-8 said, excruciatingly slowly, spelling Poe’s name in long form. “He ordered me to leave him. Again. And they hurt him. They hurt him.”

“I saw,” Finn said. “Oh B. I saw that. They sent a holovid. They said he was probably dead. We thought he was dead.” _We were certain he was dead, and we planned accordingly_. Finn didn’t know what to do now; his insides were numb, but starting to kind of hurt. He should have been unreservedly happy to hear that Poe wasn’t dead, but it was excruciating because now he was worrying again.

“He’s not dead,” BB-8 said. “But he sent me away.” Eir beeps were soft and slow, at that, and it wasn’t hard to read em as sorrowful. “He told Luke to get my override codes and reset me.”

Finn wasn’t sure, but that sounded like a betrayal. “Oh B,” he said. That didn’t sound like Poe thought he’d ever be all right again. He glanced up, and Organa was still standing, staring wordlessly at the man who had just climbed down from the cockpit. Luke. Skywalker? The Last Jedi? Was he really?

He looked like-- well, a man the General’s age. He looked a little older, maybe. Not so carefully-kept. He had a beard, and it was gray. He was neither a large nor imposing man, but he had the same weight of personality as the General. He was dressed all in shades of gray.

Finn could feel the power in him, could feel a vague sense of-- pressure, or something, he wouldn’t have been able to say what. “But Poe is with Rey now,” BB-8 said.

“That’s good,” Finn said. “If he’d be safe anywhere, it’d be there.”

Leia moved her arms, and Luke tilted his head, and clearly they were having a whole conversation silently. At last Luke said, softly, “I’m sorry,” and Leia shook her head.

“I don’t know if Poe will ever be safe,” BB-8 said, shuddering internally in a way Finn had never felt before.

Luke and Leia embraced, and Finn sat with his arms looped around BB-8, watching. Others had come out from the hangar area, watching silently, keeping a respectful distance. He was the closest witness. He knew he’d be interrogated later. He’d say they hadn’t said a word, it sounded better that way.

Leia tipped her head back, and Luke let her go, stepping back and putting his hands on her shoulders. She looked up at him; he wasn’t a tall man, and was slight of build, and the resemblance between them wasn’t strong, but they were clearly family. “There’s a lot of work to do,” Organa said, quietly, and Luke nodded.

Finn gave BB-8 one last squeeze, and stood up, using his hands to knock the dirt off his pants where he’d landed on the ground. Skywalker looked at him, and for some reason it startled Finn to notice that the man had blue eyes. Organa’s were almost as dark as Poe’s. There was an intense feeling of-- heat, or pressure, or _something_ \-- coming off of Skywalker, but as Finn took a step toward them, he got a more distinct impression that it was coming off of both of them.

“Luke,” Organa said, “this is Finn. He was a Stormtrooper, and defected; he’s become a member of my staff, and gave us the intel that let us destroy the Starkiller weapon before it was used a second time.”

“Poe told me a great deal about you,” Luke said, “but he didn’t mention that you’re Force-sensitive.”

“I’m what now?” Finn asked, mystified.

“Perhaps not as strong as Rey,” Luke said, “but notable regardless.”

“Damn it,” Organa said, “don’t take _everybody_ away from me.”

“I’m not taking anybody anywhere,” Skywalker said. “We have a war to fight.”

A dark, fierce joy blossomed somewhere inside Finn’s ribcage, and he wasn’t sure if it was his or Organa’s, but he felt it nonetheless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel bad, there's really delayed gratification on the romantic subplot.   
> I warned you! I did.   
> Meanwhile, though, I wrote some fluff. It's non-explicit but it's cute, damn it. [You'd Be Amazed](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7031329), which is set a while after all of this. It's pretty light on plot.


	4. All I Have To Do Is Survive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finn plans a mission, rescues a TIE pilot, and gets his way. Poe and Rey hatch a perhaps cunning, but definitely desperate plan. And Kes... well, he never was too good at getting droids to do what he wanted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It feels like it's been longer than a week since the last update. HI I MISSED YOU.

 

 

“You’re planning a mission,” Teeny said.

Finn looked up from his datapad. It was midday, and she’d spent the morning at the shooting range, proving (to Finn’s great satisfaction) that she was an excellent shot. He’d led the training, but had gradually faded back and let her take over; it looked like Teeny’s duties had occasionally included firearms instruction, because she had no difficulty at all in leading firing drills. So she wasn’t just a specialty weapons operator, she was competent at all of the standard firearms including the specialty ones.

Good; the Resistance was short on well-drilled weapons instructors. It would be a good position for her. It didn’t involve any sensitive information and didn’t expose her to any particular danger, and made use of skills she already had. Finn had pulled away and continued to work on his planning while she slowly took over the session. He was, perhaps, over-planning a mission, but he wanted to be prepared for any objections.

“Yeah,” he said, and rubbed his face; he’d been spending too long looking at the slightly-fuzzy screen.

She fidgeted with her food, and from her posture he could tell she had a toe turned in uncertainly. “I want to help,” she said quietly.

He shook his head, wobbling his shoulders a little (the helmet obscured head movements, to an extent, so he’d noticed that even out of it Teeny still exaggerated her head gestures). “You know I can’t let you,” he said, quiet. “We haven’t proven to them that you’re a real defector.”

“It took them a while to trust you,” Teeny said.

He nodded. “I proved myself,” he said.

She considered that, eating methodically as she did so, making no signals. Finally she said, “The officer who recruited us, he said this might be a trap.”

This was new information. “Did he?” Finn said quietly, neutral but encouraging.

“He was sincere,” she said. “He said we’d been chosen because they knew we were sincere, somehow.” Her shoulder was tilted inward, her head down a little; it wasn’t a signal, but it was body language. Shoulder posture was less easy to indicate in the armor, so it wasn’t used formally in the signals, but it was an intensifier. “I think Kylo Ren read our minds.”

“Really,” Finn said, a little alarmed.

“We were all shown a holo and he was there, and then the next day a couple of us were sent off on weird patrols, like paired up in ways we normally weren’t, and the captain found us and talked to us then,” she said. “I think he-- Ren-- read our minds during the holo. He was looking for a reaction. And it was a reaction I must’ve had.” She curled in on herself even more. “It was a holo about the destruction of Hosnia. It made me feel bad.”

“I see,” Finn said.

“He told us, though, that this might be a trap,” she said. “That maybe they were letting us go for real, to try to make some greater scheme work, but maybe they were going to use us to set a trap instead.” She put her fork down. “So I don’t-- I don’t think you can trust me but it’s not because of anything I--” She hesitated, and Finn patiently let her pick a word, instead of suggesting any. “Anything I want,” she finished.

He nodded. “That was what I thought,” he said.

“They showed us the holo about you,” she said. “The ones of us the captain pulled aside-- we watched your holo. Where you were talking, straight to us. And it made some of us mad. But me-- it made me--” She stopped, and the fingers of her hand curled and uncurled, a meaningless gesture. “Jealous. I want to-- make up my own mind about things.”

“I hope you’ll be able to,” Finn said, as reassuring as he could be. He could feel her agitation somehow, as if he was aware of her-- in the Force, he realized suddenly. Skywalker wasn’t just saying that. Finn _could_ feel her.

She picked up her fork again. “If there are ways I can help you,” she said, “that wouldn’t-- risk anything. I’ll do that.”

He smiled at her, for that, and saw her notice his expression. “Yeah,” he said. “I’d like that.”

 

________

 

 

“Don’t be a piece of shit,” Kes said to the loading droid.

“Instructions unclear,” the droid said in Basic, one of its pre-recorded response phrases-- the only one of its response phrases Kes had yet heard it utter. Kes took his patience in both hands.

“You,” he said, enunciating as clearly as he could, “stack these no more than three high.”

“Instructions unclear,” the droid said.

Kes considered how many pieces he could dismantle the droid into if he just started hitting it with this wrench. He let his breath out, took in another one. It was a Coscorp droid, sent along with the load from one of the company’s freighters, and it had atrocious programming. Another point in Fronteras’ favor, they had better droids.

Another droid beeped at him, in Binary, as it rolled up. It was an unfamiliar R-unit, an astromech, and it came up and stuck an interface extension into the loading droid without ceremony. The loading droid beeped back at it in Binary, then abruptly recalibrated itself.

“Load, stack, three or fewer high,” the loading droid said. “Input accepted.”

The R-unit pulled its interface extension back out and warbled cheerfully at Kes. “Thanks,” he said to it. “Why didn’t it understand me?”

“Shitty programming,” a voice said, and Kes turned to see the astro’s presumable owner ambling up. He was a short, dark-haired man with big bright eyes, and Kes knew him from somewhere. He was young, dressed in a leather jacket that screamed _starfighter pilot_ , and Kes froze as he recognized him.

“Iolo Arana,” he said, shocked: the man looked not a day older than the last time Kes had seen him.

“Kes Dameron,” Iolo said, looking impossibly twentyish.

Keshians had different maturation timelines than humans, Kes remembered. And as that ran across his mind, he realized that there couldn’t be a whole lot of reasons for a friend of Poe’s from the Academy to have come all the way out here, and his innards suddenly turned to ice. Iolo and Poe had been close; Poe had been popular, had had a lot of friends, but Arana was the only one who’d come home on a school break. Poe’s second-last year at the Academy. Iolo’s family had been having some kind of drama, and he hadn’t wanted to go home for break.

And, years later, Iolo had defected to the Resistance with Poe. He was with them now, Kes was sure of it. And he was standing there looking taut-faced and sad and there was no doubt why he’d be here now.

“He’s dead,” Kes said, calm.

Arana’s face went tight. “Maybe,” he said. After a moment, he admitted, “Probably.”

Kes breathed in, let it out slowly. “Figures. It took me four days to put together a holo to send him. Didn’t send it yet. Was going to tomorrow.” He breathed in again, breathed out. “You’d better tell me what _probably_ means.”

Arana nodded, and his big uncanny eyes had gone flat and liquid.

“Maybe you need to tell Norasol too,” Kes said. Norasol had liked Arana. He’d had the kind of manners she considered good. Well, he’d been a nice kid, was the thing. For all he was an outsider, he’d understood how things were here.

Arana nodded, and swallowed hard. “This isn’t an official visit,” he said hoarsely. “I’m. I’m AWOL. I’m supposed to be.” He stopped, and pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, trying to compose himself. “I’m supposed to be on my way somewhere. I just-- I couldn’t let them just send you a message.”

Kes gritted his teeth. “Leia Organa wouldn’t approve you coming here?”

“I didn’t ask,” Arana got out. “I couldn’t—” He was pretty clearly about to lose his composure entirely.

“Hey,” Kes said, and put his arm around the man’s shoulders, pulling him in close. “Hey. It’s all right. Where’d you park your bird?”

Arana pulled himself together, leaning on Kes’s shoulder, and managed to give a composed answer. Kes found his assistant, a capable young woman named Rodia, and told her he had to go down planetside for a personal issue.

She took in Arana’s appearance, and whatever she saw in Kes’s face, and said, “You comm me, Kes, if you need anything.”

“The X-Wing in Bay 5 is this guy’s,” Kes said, “we’ll take care of it when we get back. Won’t be long.”

“Understood,” she said. “There’s nothing here we can’t handle tonight.”

“Thanks,” Kes said. It was an hour commute down to Yavin 4 from the space station harbor that served both inhabited worlds of the system, and Iolo sat opposite him in the shuttle.

“Poe said you were mad,” Iolo said. “Said you weren’t. Speaking to him.” He wiped at his eyes.

Kes nodded, and looked down at the floor. “I wasn’t,” he said. “It’s-- Arana, there’s--”

“I know these things are complicated,” Arana said. “My shit with my family is insane. I’m not judging you, Kes, I just-- it seemed really important to me that someone come tell you in person, because it’s not straightforward.”

Kes let that sit a moment, then rubbed his face. “If he’s not dead," he said. He’d been trying not to think about it, trying to just trust that it would be revealed, but it was starting to sink in and he thought he might throw up.

“He’s been captured,” Arana said, “and his captors— made a verification holovid, to prove they had him.” He put a hand against his side— a pocket— he had— oh stars.

“You have the holovid,” Kes said dully.

“I do,” Arana said. He closed his eyes. “Bounty hunters. I’m sorry.”

Something tore loose, somewhere inside Kes’s ribs, and fell away into a deep, cold hollow absence, and he nodded and looked down at the floor, and tried to remember how to breathe.

Norasol met him at the gate. “Why are you home in the middle of the day,” she said, and her expression was terrible; she’d seen him coming, she knew something was wrong. She looked at Arana, and she clearly recognized him, and she began to tremble all over.

Kes wrapped his arms around her and kept her upright, more or less bundling her along the walkway to his house, and in the door, and into the kitchen chair.

“Is he dead,” Norasol said, and sometime in the last fifteen years since his last visit, Arana had learned Iberican, because he answered in a passable accent.

“It would be kindest if he is, Auntie.”

 

________

 

 

Rey was in a market when she saw the holo Dameron had mentioned, the other time BB-8 had recorded him singing. It was on what she recognized was a news program. She’d been watching it already, sort of absently, as she picked out food— they had food at the hospital, but Poe’s appetite was poor and the medical staff worried at the weight he’d already lost. She’d hit on the solution of bringing him things that she was curious about, and he’d usually eat along with her after explaining the food to her. So it was a double victory, and often coaxed more of what she’d begun thinking of as Real Poe out from under Brave Face Poe, which was his normal persona— different in attitude but not in substance from the sullen and doomed persona she’d yelled at him for.

It was kind of just as well, though. Real Poe had facial expressions that made her feel things she didn’t understand. She could only take so much of him at once.

She stood with a bag of preserved fruits in her hand and looked up at the holo next to the checkout kiosk. “The search continues for noted Resistance member and controversial Republican Fleet defector Poe Dameron,” the newscaster said. She was a Twi’lek, head tails wrapped around her lovely neck. “Rumors abound of his injury and capture by bounty hunters, but no one has taken responsibility. The First Order has a standing bounty on all Resistance members, with a higher value given for pilots, but Dameron’s bounty was abruptly increased by a factor of ten last month after a holovid of him singing a protest song became one of the most-shared vids on the holo exchange network.”

And then they played some of the holovid, splicing into it in the midst of the song. It was shot from a low angle that Rey recognized immediately as being BB-8’s camera; Dameron filled the screen, face soft with concentration as he watched his own fingers on the guitar frets. He was singing a song that to her ears was unironic, about doing your duty to the Republic, but he looked desperately sad as he sang. His voice was fuller now than in the Little Beep song, a little bit lower and hoarser, and she stared transfixed at how achingly sweet the song was despite the bland patriotic lyrics.

His expression shifted from sadness to maybe anger. The Republic had always been very much an abstraction for her, its action or inaction against various threats more or less meaningless, but she supposed that as he’d directly worked for it, he might have taken it more personally. In the vid, Dameron threw his head back like it hurt him, like the song was pulling itself out of his chest, and Rey watched in fascination. His voice cracked like he was crying, and he breathed the last syllable, looking down at the instrument with his face a mask of pain, and then he set his mouth and the tune changed, flowing into another one like it was supposed to be like that.

And the tune was familiar suddenly, it was something that had played sometimes in town, back on Jakku, on Unkar’s rusty old speakers, a popular ballad.

 _But she deceived me, and I am undone_ , Dameron sang, and Rey knew that song. _She deceived me,_ he repeated, _and I am undone_ , and Rey got it suddenly, got why this was political. Oh. Yeah, he took the Republic’s failure to act personally.

“I hope they don’t catch him,” someone said next to Rey, and she glanced over; it was the shopkeeper.

“Me too,” she said, looking back up as the holovid ended and the newscaster came back on.

“His bounty now stands at half a million credits,” the newscaster said, “and only the fact that he remains on the latest update of the First Order’s bounty list seems to suggest that he has not, in fact, been captured.”

“Sharp young man like that,” the shopkeeper said, “and you know his parents was heroes of the Rebellion, he wouldn’t have been no traitor. If he changed sides it was warranted— the Republic betrayed him, and it betrayed all of us.”

“Be careful how you speak, old woman,” another customer said, a Keshian woman of middling age. “There’s ears everywhere.”

“Oh,” the shopkeeper said, “is this how we live now?”

“It’s how we’ve always lived,” the woman said bleakly.

Rey bought her preserved fruits and some hard cheese and got out.

 

 

“There’s a lot you could teach me, though,” Rey said, a while later, over the remains of the cheese. “You’re not just a pilot.”

“True,” Dameron said. Today’s breakthrough was that he could almost read holoscreens. He was managing, in little snatches, with one eye closed, but it was closer than he’d been, and he was taking it as a victory. His mood was also buoyed by the preserved fruit, which was apparently, and totally by coincidence, his favorite thing on this entire planet.

“You’re a spy, too,” she said. Everyone was cagey about it, but she knew it was true.

“I am,” he conceded. He glanced sidelong at her. “I could probably teach you some things.”

 

That was how they wound up at a little restaurant, Dameron in an elaborate mechanical wheeled chair. It was an ingenious little contraption, lightweight and maneuverable and such a clever design Rey was sort of annoyed with herself for not thinking of it herself. If she’d built something, though, it would have had repulsor technology, not wheels, so it would have been a lot louder and less suitable for indoor use.

He had done something to put white streaks in his hair, and was swathed in blankets and sweaters, and had found a pair of dark glasses somewhere, and it all made him look uncannily unlike himself.

The first thing he taught her was how to properly order from a waiter. Then he taught her how to evaluate who was looking at her and who wasn’t, and why. She could read people’s intentions in the Force, often, but all it told her in this case was generally that he was right.

“I know you can use the Force for that,” he said, before she’d even said anything, “but this way’s faster and won’t let you down in a pinch.” He tapped on the table, then subtly gestured at someone across the patio. “And then you’re not caught by surprise when it’s someone like that, who you won’t be able to read.”

Sure enough, when Rey surreptitiously glanced over, the person he’d gestured to was a blank-- tall, swathed in dark colors, stirring a cup with a long thin finger. “How did you know?” she hissed.

“Droid,” Poe said. “That’s an oil cup, they’re blue so the staff know not to use them for real food.”

“Oh,” Rey said, and snuck another look. He was right. She frowned, and turned back to him. “I have been working on droids. They’re alive, they’re sapient, I should be able to feel them.”

“I thought it was impossible,” Dameron said. He looked interested. Hard to tell; the glasses hid his eyes. He was acting generally a lot more frail than he was, and it was astonishing how old he looked. Most notably, his hands were visibly unsteady, and she knew that wasn’t genuine, but it looked convincing.

“They’re not biological,” Rey said, “but they’re alive, and-- I can feel them physically, so-- I am definitely working on it. I know when BB-8’s around, if I’m listening, but R2 isn’t distinctive enough physically.”

Dameron was staring at her. “What does Luke say about this?”

Rey blinked at him. “What would he say?” she asked. Suddenly worried, she said, “Am I supposed to have asked permission?”

“No no,” Dameron said. “Just-- I was wondering if he had given you any pointers on that.”

She shook her head. “I asked about droids, and he said generally they weren’t amenable to Force suggestion, and that was as much as we discussed it. He didn’t get into the theory.”

“Hm,” Dameron said. “What about Thradikans?”

“I don’t know what those are,” Rey said.

“They’re Force-blind,” Dameron said. “So far they’re the only race we know of like it. Zero Force-sensitives, but also not Force-susceptible. They’re kind of-- insectoid? Not much for individual consciousness. But they’re around, you can talk to them, they’re technically sentients.”

“Huh,” Rey said.

“What the hell has Luke actually been teaching you?” he asked, leaning his head on his hand and picking up his cup of-- whatever he was drinking, it had been a dizzying flurry of words to order it the way he apparently liked it.

“A lot of things,” Rey said, “but mostly we’ve just been getting shot at a lot. My life has a lot of that in it, now, ever since I met BB-8.”

“Is that what you use as your landmark?” Dameron asked.

“It’s when things started to get weird,” she said.

“Not Finn,” Dameron said.

She shook her head. “No, BB-8 introduced me to Finn.”

“BB-8 told you to go beat the hell out of Finn,” Dameron said, laughing.

“Well,” Rey said, “in our defense, he’d stolen your jacket.”

Poe looked like himself when he laughed, not a creepy old man. Rey watched, a little fascinated. “If he hadn’t,” Dameron said, “you’d never have found him.” He was gazing out across the room, eyes wandering behind the distortion of the lenses. “Funny how coincidences like that work.”

“It is,” she said. “BB-8 is an exceptionally sharp-witted astromech, though, isn’t ey?”

“Yeah,” Dameron said. “You know, ey isn’t my first astro.”

“No?” Rey asked, interested.

Dameron shook his head minutely, a subtle gesture, most of the motion in his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth. “At the Academy we got old ones, usually, to train with, and I pissed somebody off so I got stuck with a particularly glitchy one. And you may not know this about me, but I’m a stubborn and contrary son-of-a-bitch, so I decided to take it as a challenge, and worked my ass off rehabbing it. I fixed it up, I learned mechanical stuff we weren’t being taught so I could repair some of its issues, I learned programming they hadn’t figured on us learning so that I could help edit some of its subroutines, and mostly I just-- I spent a ton of time with the thing, working out its glitches and begging new spare parts from the mech shop for it, and getting the mech instructors to teach me how to fix it, and all. And by the end of the semester, I’d totally rehabbed the thing, and it was by far the most functional of the teaching droids. They’d been figuring on wiping it and selling it for scrap, and instead I’d repaired it better than when it was new.”

“Wow,” Rey said.

He flashed her a small smile before returning his gaze to the other side of the room. “Well,” he said, “like I said. Someone basically dared me to. But I learned some things. Not least, droids know a lot more than people expect. Once I got the thing to trust me, I found out it was over a hundred years old and had memories going back to before the Clone Wars. I mean, this thing was a relic of the Old Republic. It knew stuff you wouldn’t believe.” Dameron waved a hand. “So I learned. Be nice to droids. Nobody ever thinks to, but they’ve got a shitload of information you’d be an idiot to discount.”

“What happened to that droid, in the end?” Rey asked.

Dameron glanced at her, then. “Well,” he said, and looked down at his mug. “It stayed on, teaching. And probably got vaporized along with all the other instructors and everyone at the Academy.”

“Oh,” Rey said. She hadn’t known. “The-- by the First Order?”

“The Academy was in the Hosnian system,” Dameron said. He shrugged, looking bleak. “Anyway. After that, when it came time for more permanent astro assignments, they chose me for one of the prototypes. The manufacturers usually sent prototypes to the Academy, and it was cool to get to be a tester.” He made a wry face. “Apparently I wasn’t a good product tester, though, because I was an atypical use case.” He shrugged. “It worked out, though.”

“BB-8 is a beautiful and sparkling example of artificial intelligence,” Rey said.

“B’s an efficient and finely-honed machine,” Dameron said. “With an experimental, one-of-a-kind learning AI driving em.”

“You didn’t tell em to run when they took you prisoner on the _Unyielding_ because you’re a softie,” Rey said. “Everyone seems to think that’s what it was, but it’s not at all.”

He took a drink from his cup in lieu of answering. “Well,” he said finally. “Here’s the thing. I store everything I find on BB. And ey’s been trained to purge eir own memory banks selectively when necessary, but— if it’s possible to avoid that sort of thing, it’s generally better. Besides which, any technician worth the title is going to have ways of recovering wiped data from memory banks like that. It’s just better to avoid the issue, and then on the upside sometimes the droid completes the mission for you. _Claro_?” And he closed one eye, scrunching up precisely half of his face in an astonishingly-charming ugly grimace.

Rey recognized the word from one of the dramatic holoprograms that had been stored in the memory bank of a datapad she’d scavenged.  Despite the lack of a translator chip, she’d raptly watched the somewhat-overwrought drama, and it had left her with a few odd rote phrases in whatever language it had been in-- more than a few, she’d basically memorized the program. “ _Claro_ ,” she said, and wondered if Poe had seen the same holodrama. Hopefully she’d understood the word correctly. It either meant “I understand” or “I will kill you as soon as your back is turned”, given the content of the holodrama. It had been one particular character’s catchphrase, and that was mostly how he’d used it.

Dameron returned his face to normal, and winked at her. “BB-8 is a classic case of mixing business with pleasure,” he said. “I like em, I enjoy our relationship, but ey’s first and foremost a functional object, y’know?”

She nodded, grinning. Dameron’s mouth was curled in a little half-smile, and his eyes were wandering over the room, the way they always wandered now. They slowed, though, as if hung up on something, and his eyebrows drew together, and even under whatever he’d done to create the illusion that he was a stooped little old man, the furrow that appeared between his eyebrows was still unreasonably attractive. It pulled Rey’s attention toward him, and so it was that the first thing she noticed amiss was the spike of concern that shot across Dameron’s awareness.

“What,” she asked, leaning forward— knowing better than to swivel around and look for whatever it was.

“Bounty hunters,” he said softly, barely moving his mouth.

Now that Rey was listening, she could feel their minds at the door— searching, analyzing, one was male and one was indeterminate, and they were working together, trying to be unobtrusive. She made herself as smooth and clear as she could, imperceptible, and hooked a query into one’s mind, yanking back to see what floated up.

“They’re looking for you,” she breathed, as Dameron’s ID photo from the news holo floated up to the surface of the mind she’d slightly disturbed. It had made that one look more keenly around the room, and she felt his gaze catch on Dameron’s stooped form, and slide off, continuing past. “They saw you and dismissed you.”

It was hard to tell what Dameron was looking at, but he was leaning forward a little, looking extra old and shaky. There wasn’t a trace of any of his characteristic expressions, and it was a profound transformation. “You’re sure of that,” he said.

“One of them did,” she amended, for accuracy.

“I’ve encountered them before,” he said. “I know their names. You’re sure they’re looking for me.”

“Yes,” Rey said, “one of them had your ID card holopic near the top of his mind.”

Dameron nodded slowly. “Well,” he said. “I suppose it was a matter of time before someone blabbed. I don’t think it would occur to Luke to buy everyone’s silence.” He smiled bitterly, looking down into his cup.

“I saw a segment about you on a news program not that long ago,” Rey said. She wasn’t sure why it hadn’t struck her to tell him that until now.

“Mm,” Dameron said, “I heard about it, one of the orderlies mentioned it. Wouldn’t be surprised if the orderly was the one who contacted the bounty hunters. Half a mil’s a lot of credits.” He set his cup down and fidgeted with it. “So. How’s about I teach you about life on the lam?”

“We can’t run,” Rey said, “we’ve no ship, and you can’t walk!”

“We have about 1200 credits,” Dameron said, closing one eye, “a wheely chair, and the clothes we’re standing up in.”

Rey thought about her belongings, in the room Luke had rented for her. The hospital didn’t know where it was, did they? “I have a room,” she said. “All my stuff is there. It’s secret. I never told anyone where I was staying.”

“I doubt it’s safe,” Dameron said. “I don’t need to go back for anything.”

“So we just hide out until Chewie and R2 get back?” Rey asked, skeptical. “It might be another week or more.”

“No,” Dameron said, “we steal a ship and get the fuck out of here.”

“You can’t fly yet,” Rey said. “You can’t travel!”

“It won’t kill me,” Dameron said, “so yes I can. All I have to do is survive-- _you_ fly the thing.”

“I don’t think we can just— steal a ship,” Rey said. “I went down to the shipyards here and it’s all very— it’s a lot more formal than I’m used to.”

Dameron chewed on his lip, wavering eyes watching what she knew were the bounty hunters. They were still checking out the place, Rey could feel it, and neither of them were particularly convinced. “Just makes it a challenge,” he said. “That and how I can’t walk. That’s a challenge too. I mean, I’m good at challenges, so that’s a thing.”

“Can’t we get a message out to get Chewie and R2 to come back?” Rey asked. “Or a message to the Resistance?”

Dameron shook his head, a small but intense movement. Rey grimaced, and watched him pay for it with a wave of dizziness that tilted him in his seat. He held on to the arms of the wheeled chair and breathed through it. “We can’t,” he said. “Possibly. Risk that kind of thing.” He breathed. “I have enough in my personal account to book passage on a respectable ship but I got no way of getting those credits without using my real name.” He smiled wanly, and his eyes went past her to keep tabs on the bounty hunters.

They were giving up, she could hear; they’d conferred, and were certain their quarry wasn’t here. “They know you’re on this planet,” she said.

“Which is why we gotta get off it,” Dameron said.

 

__________________________

 

 

Finn woke as footsteps approached his hut. Not many people came by here. In the cot crammed in perpendicular to the foot of his bed, Teeny was silent, probably shallowly asleep; she breathed loudly when she was deeply asleep.

Someone tapped at Finn’s door, and he swung out of bed and opened it warily. He didn’t go armed, hadn’t felt the lack, but suddenly now was acutely aware that no one was guarding him.

It was Major Ematt. “Ah,” Ematt said, “sorry to wake you, but I’m glad I found you. We tracked down another one of the defectors you’d told us to look for.”

“You did,” Finn said. He rubbed his face; he’d been really asleep. It took him a moment to contextualize everything. “Another Stormtrooper?”

“No,” Ematt said, “we think this one’s a pilot. We, ah, we haven’t brought him in yet. We thought maybe you could.”

Finn nodded. “Half a second,” he said. “I need-- shoes.”

“I’ll be in the op center,” Ematt said, “we’re taking a shuttle with a couple fighters as an escort.”

Finn nodded again, and stepped back, but before he shut the door he said, “Wait,” and turned to Teeny, who was still lying as if asleep. Clearly, she was pretending; nobody could have slept through this. “Teeny. You can help with this one.”

She rolled over and sat up, alert: she’d clearly been awake. “Yes,” she said, flat but eager.

 

Unexpectedly, Teeny took the lead. “I know him,” she had said, in the shuttle, looking at the holopic the concerned Resistance operative in the village had sent along of the strange man who had shown up without explanation. There had been accounts of a TIE’s distinctive noise being heard in the dark, terrifying the village, and then the man had shown up with no clear way to account for himself. He’d been cornered in an abandoned house and was refusing to come out, but no violence had been done. The villagers had found the TIE, though-- an older model, stripped, and it had landed well, clearly handled by someone better-trained than Teeny had been.

“What’s his name?” Ematt asked, and Teeny looked uncertainly at Finn.

“JN-4002,” she said quietly. “If he has a callsign I don’t know it. But he was one of the ones the captain talked to.”

Finn nodded. “Would he know you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Finn caught Ematt’s mystified look, and said, “Stormtroopers never take their helmets off, but pilots often do.”

“Oh,” Ematt said, not much enlightened but perhaps somewhat reminded of what he was dealing with.

“The vac-heads have to sometimes,” Teeny put in. She fidgeted, toe pointing in, but clearly made herself speak up. “Anyway he’s a hotshot, he was four eight a couple times.”

“They put his pic up on the morale board,” Finn translated. “If you did an exemplary job sometimes you got up on the four eight announcements.”

“What’s four eight refer to?” Ematt asked.

Finn opened his mouth, shut it, looked at Teeny. Teeny raised both shoulders exaggeratedly-- a shrug, one of the gestures everybody seemed to use. “I don’t know,” Finn said. “I never heard it explained.”

 

They strategized, but when they got to the abandoned hut where the villagers were standing guard, Teeny simply walked up to the barricaded door. “If he were armed,” she said, “he would have shot you all already. He’s a vac-head, so his aim is probably for shit but that don’t mean he can’t shoot.”

She knocked on the door. “JN-4002,” she said. “Jig’s up. I know it’s you.”

“Who are you?” came a muffled voice from the blocked-off broken window.

“GK-3916,” she said. “I know you wouldn’t know my face, and my voice is different with the helmet off, but you taught me how to crash a TIE.”

There was a scraping noise, and the battered wall panel that had been hastily shoved into the broken window slid to one side slightly. A face peered out, indistinct, and out of any line of fire. Teeny tipped her head to look in the window. “Really?” the muffled voice said, softer and clearer.

“Yes, really,” she said.

“And,” he said falteringly. “They-- they know.”

“I surrendered in my gear,” she said. “Remember? They were supposed to know about me.”

“I figured they’d just kill you,” he said.

Teeny shrugged. “Not so far,” she said. “I told them-- I told them there’d be more of us. C’mon, they won’t shoot you if you come out with me here.”

“How do you know that?” he asked.

She turned around. “Will you shoot him?” she asked. “I guess I should’ve asked you that first before I promised him anything. But I didn’t figure you wanted to shoot him.”

“No,” Finn said, coming forward. He had a blaster, but he hadn’t drawn it. “No, we don’t want to shoot him.”

The face tilted behind the window, moving to get a look at him, but the angles all reassured Finn that the guy really didn’t have a blaster; if he did, he wasn’t leaving himself any room to use it. “Hey,” the man said, “is that—”

“It is,” Teeny said.

“I used to be FN-2187,” Finn said. “If you come out from there you’ll be under my protection.”

The face disappeared from the window, and there was a scraping noise. Finn realized he was unbarricading the door. He sized it up: was there likely to be a booby trap? It didn’t look likely. Still, he hung back a little behind Teeny, and she glanced back at him.

There was a thump, and finally the panel blocking the door fell away. Finn held up his hand, as one of the villagers moved position to get a better look. “We’re not crowding anybody,” he said, and the villager stopped obediently.

The man in the doorway was smallish, and dressed in unexceptional civvies. He was a bit grimy and dust-covered, doubtless from whatever mad scramble had led him in here, but otherwise he looked like any traveler. Stormtroopers wore their hair cropped very short, but his was a little longer, just long enough to curl; pilots were given a little more individual freedom in their styles of dress. He was completely unexceptional.

Except that the inhabitants of this planet all wore homespun fabric in loose garments, with their hair long, and so he stuck out as a traveler. And there was no spaceport nearby, and he wasn’t dressed for a long walk. He had sensible boots, but they weren’t trekking boots.

It had been a bad choice of locations to set a man down without a plausible explanation. Their intelligence wasn’t great, or wasn’t suited for this.

Finn smiled ruefully at him. “JN-4002,” he said. “Do you have a callsign, or any other name you’d want to be called, or do you want to think about that?”

The pilot tilted his head a little, regarding Finn uncertainly. “Why do you ask?” He had dark eyes, like Poe’s, and gold skin like Poe’s, and his dark hair curled like Poe’s did if he didn’t style it— he had more than a passing resemblance to Poe, in stature and bearing as well as coloring. The realization hurt, a little, but Finn didn’t have time for that.

“Because,” Finn said, “I want to know what I should call you.”

“I gotta think about that,” the pilot said warily. “Are you the Resistance?”

“I am,” Finn said. “Teeny told us we should expect you.”

JN-4002’s mouth tightened a little, and he flicked a glance toward her, looking dismayed and irritated. Finn laughed gently. “That’s not why we found you,” he said. “We found you because whoever sent you to this planet dressed like that fucked up. But because I’d put the word out, they called us first instead of whatever else they’d’ve done to you here.” He extended a hand toward the pilot. “I’m going to take you in and ask you some questions, but I’m not interested in killing you.”

The pilot chewed on his lower lip, gaze flicking out to the gathered villagers, who were keeping their distance as Finn had asked, but didn’t look exactly friendly. “What are you interested in?” he asked, looking back at Finn.

“If Teeny’s told me true,” Finn said, “then I’m very interested in what you have to say. If you have any weapons, turn them over to me now, and come with me, and I’ll treat you well. It’s the best offer you’re likely to get.”

JN-4002 looked Finn over, looked at Teeny, looked out at the villagers, and looked back at Finn. “Deal,” he said, and pulled out a small blaster from a holster hidden under his jacket at the small of his back. He held it out handle-first toward Finn, holding his other hand up palm-outward to show it was empty.

Finn took the blaster and put it in his jacket pocket. “Excellent choice, friend,” he said.

 

______________________________

 

 

“That one?” Poe squinted skeptically at it. He was getting depressingly good at figuring out what was going on even without being able to look straight at anything. And this wheelie chair, he could get around in this. He was almost mad they hadn’t given it to him earlier. Except, of course, he wouldn’t have been stable enough to sit in it before about-- well, maybe yesterday.

He _was_ getting better. He just wasn’t sure it would ever be good enough to matter.

Maybe someday he could look straight at things again. That might be nice. He wouldn’t hold out for walking. That was too much to hope for.

“It’s not much of a ship,” Rey said, “but the yard warden believed me pretty easily when I said I was the owner’s granddaughter and wanted to fix it up.” She’d only had to use Force suggestion a little. Her conscience wouldn’t let her steal a ship that someone actively needed; this one was one of several an aging merchant had set aside for repair and never gotten to.

“How much fixing up does it need, though?” Poe asked. It was good that Rey had a conscience, sure, but he sort of wished she didn’t at the moment. It would be nice if she could just go and mind-bend the owner of a really nice ship that’d be comfortable.

It wouldn’t matter, though. Regardless of how nice the ship was, _he_ wasn’t going to fly it. And it wasn’t like it’d be comfortable no matter how well-appointed the thing was. Even wheeling himself around in the chair was unpleasant; the movements of flying were going to be torture.

Might as well be some clunky hunk-of-junk freighter. Maybe it’d implode in space and put an end to this whole stupid adventure.

Poe couldn’t wish for that, it would kill Rey too. And he didn’t want to die. He wasn’t suicidal. He just sort of wished he could-- stop. He still had a lot to do and regardless of whether he was ever able to live a normal life he still had obligations. Important ones.

He had to kind of repeat that to himself a lot.

Rey was doing some sort of internal math, it seemed. “A day’s work,” she said, “maybe two. I can get the parts from what’s here, and the guy figures it’s on the account the ship’s owner already has going, so he’s happy to put it on the tab. It’ll be no big deal.”

“Who does he think I am?” Poe asked, leaning on the arm of the wheely chair and reflecting that the ship maybe didn’t look so bad if you were only seeing one of it. Lately his vision tended to double, and it just made everything worse.

Rey shot Poe a look; the Rey on the left looked amused, but the Rey on the right looked apologetic, so he braced himself. “I told him you were my eccentric old uncle and I was doing this to humor you.”

“Phenomenal,” Poe said. “I can do old and crazy.”

“I know,” Rey said. “You’re alarmingly good at it.”

Poe shrugged. “Nice to have a job I can actually do,” he said. They were holed up at the farthest shipyard from the main area of the city. Getting out here by hired speeder had just about killed him, but he’d survived it.

Living his worst nightmare was turning out to be both not as bad as, and much worse than, he’d always assumed it would be. He’d never thought about the details, like trying to take a piss when you couldn’t reliably stand on your own. Turned out the mundane shit was what made it awful, and the overarching conceptual stuff was a lot easier to ignore.

He missed Finn, too, which was its own kind of awful. (At least he knew Finn didn’t want for other friends to console him, in Poe’s absence.) In his abjection, he missed his family, missed his auntie and his father, the father who wasn’t speaking to him because he’d defected, the father who was a huge hypocrite. He figured talking about this with Rey would probably be unrewarding, given that at least his father had waited until he was an adult to cut ties. But there was something about being really badly physically hurt that just made you want your Papa, and it was a sting that hadn’t been that bitter in quite some time.

And he missed BB-8, which at least he could discuss with Rey, as it was something she could comment on, and also it wasn’t something he was conflicted about notably. He’d been an ass to em, but in supportive environs BB-8 was likely to not be too negatively affected by that.

He hoped, anyway.

“Let’s just hope,” Rey said, “that I can work faster than the bounty hunters.” They’d risked a trip back to her boarding house, and she’d had a lot of stuff, most of which was proving useful now. It was entertaining to Poe to try to figure out what of her possessions she’d purchased, and what she’d scavenged. This was a wealthy planet, comfortable and rich in resources, so people threw things away that they wouldn’t, elsewhere.

Poe needed Rey’s help to get into the ship. The ramp was too steep for the chair. Once inside, he avoided thinking about how terrible the ship was, and occupied himself unpacking their stuff, because he could sit down to do it.

The ship, a tiny little craft intended mostly for light transport duty, only had one bunk. It was meant to be crewed by two, who’d trade off using the bunk. It was-- awkward, but Poe had put up with a lot more awkwardness than that. He could sit in the pilot’s seat while Rey slept, if they were in this thing that long.

“It’s a good thing I brought bedding,” Rey said, looking skeptically at the worn-thin cushions that were the only thing on the ship’s sole bunk.

Normally Poe would worry about scavenged things having trackers in them, but Rey had already thought of that. She’d pulled two out of the wheelie chair, and another one out of the seam of Poe’s shirt, which suggested really strongly that someone at the hospital had sold him out. Instead of destroying the trackers, Rey had deftly inserted them into the bumper of a posh cafe customer’s speeder, so they were now reporting Poe moving around somewhere in a nice neighborhood, no doubt.

Rey went out and started working on the exterior of the ship. Poe distracted himself from worrying about how he couldn’t go and help her; mostly he cleaned the interior with the rudimentary cleaning supplies they’d brought, and disassembled the control panel to clean it out. That was as much maintenance as he really knew how to do on this sort of thing-- the cosmetic stuff. He knew how to look for corrosion and how to trace a circuit to make sure it wasn’t interrupted, and that was about it.

It was excruciating to try to focus his eyes that finely for so long, though. Rey came back in to find him slumped over the dashboard with his knuckles in his eye sockets, trying to damp down some of the pain. To his chagrin, he was distracted enough that he didn’t hear her come in; his first clue was when she brushed her fingers gently over the back of his shoulder, and crouched down next to him. “Hey,” she murmured, settling her palm lightly against his shoulder.

He jumped slightly, but couldn’t raise his head. “Headache,” he said, “I just need a minute.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “Did you find any electrical issues in here?”

He gestured vaguely at the display without raising his head. “Vath’s nest by the copilot station, fortunately vacant, chewed through a wire or two. Cleaned it out, left it exposed, didn’t repair it. Can’t keep steady enough for wiring.”

“I’ll fix it, that’s dead easy,” she said.

“I _know_ it is,” he said, and he couldn’t help moaning it a little. “I’m sorry, I’m whining. Maybe I’m only a flyboy but I can rewire a simple control switch if only I could control my fucking eyes!”

Rey’s hand moved across his back soothingly. “Do pilots not usually do the maintenance on their own craft?” she asked.

Poe managed to raise his head and look at her, though focusing his eyes was beyond him. The fuzzy Rey on the right looked curious, the fuzzy Rey on the left looked a little scandalized. “The basics,” he said. “It’s what separates the pilots from the washouts. You gotta be able to keep the thing flying, or they don’t let you fly ‘em.” He shrugged. “Just the basics, though. The mechanics get tetchy if you try to do anything too fancy."

“Oh,” Rey said, looking either abashed (left) or worried (right). “I, uh. Oh.”

“Not you!” Poe said. “Not you. Oh, not you, they know you can do whatever you want. They wouldn’t get mad if you did whatever you wanted to any of the craft. It’s just. The Academy guys, like me, we’re the worst, because we think we know it all. You know, we got this fancy education, we think we know better than everybody, so we’re trying to add on fancy aftermarket shit onto our birds and make ‘em special, and we really don’t know what the hell we’re doing.” He waved a hand. “That’s all I meant. No, I just stick to the basic shit and I follow the instructions in the manual.”

“You went to the Academy,” Rey said, and she sounded a little shy, or uncertain, or something.

“Yeah,” Poe said, wondering why that would be something she hesitated to ask. “All I ever wanted was to be a pilot and that’s what they taught me.” He laughed a little hollowly. “They taught me all kinds of other shit too but I don’t know how much of it they really meant me to learn.”

“Other things,” she said. He could hear her fidgeting around-- ah, she was fixing the wiring.

He laughed again. Stars his head fucking _hurt_. “Like drinking,” he said. “I learned a lot about drinking. And cheating at games of chance. Sexual experimentation.” He raised a hand and flapped it. “All the wild stories they tell about pilots, they’re all based in that kind of thing. The wild shit we get up to at the Academy. And then we come out like-- full of ourselves and impossible to work with. That’s the stereotype.”

“You don’t really seem like an asshole,” she said.

He tried to give her a look, but the interior of the ship spun wildly and he had to put his head back down. Right. _Don’t do that._ “I’m _totally_ an asshole,” he said. “I’m just a little off my game at the moment.”

He was squeezing his eyes shut too tightly, and the pain spiked unbearably. He was making it worse, he knew; he kept tensing all his muscles and gritting his teeth to brace for impact because the vertigo convinced his body he was falling, and everything was wound so tight now after days of it, and he just couldn’t ease off.

The pain eased abruptly, with shocking suddenness, and he gasped in the sudden sucking absence of it, reeling. Rey’s hand was on his head, and the eerie insubstantial intensity of the Force was washing down over his body.

For an instant, just an instant, the world stood still and was right-side-up, in sharp focus, and with no distortion or doubling, and he could tell what was up and what was down, and nothing was spinning. He had just enough time to stare in disbelief before the sickening roll started in again, dragging him ceaselessly to the left. He couldn’t help but make a strangled little noise of despair, though he throttled it down ruthlessly-- you didn’t thank someone for something like that by asking why there wasn’t more, but it was sort of gut-wrenchingly cruel.

“I’m sorry,” Rey said quietly, and dropped into the copilot’s chair with a heaviness that spoke of exhaustion. He could see her well enough to see her hand shake as she tried to pick up the solderer again. “Did it help?”

“Yeah,” he said, closing his eyes, not against pain this time but to give himself a moment to get it together. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“I think I can rig a perimeter alarm,” she said, “before nightfall, so we’ll at least be able to sleep tonight.”

He wanted to protest. But she’d only remind him that his mission was to heal as best he could, and that was that. There was no point protesting.

He’d never done very well as the junior officer, but that was unquestionably his current status. And he had to suck it up and deal.

 

__________________________

 

 

This was it. Finn’s hand-picked squad, on his carefully-planned mission. They were going to take this base, and with it the orbital satellite, currently unmanned save for the one X-Wing pilot who had crept onto it and was now manning its sensor arrays as she saw fit, and the entire field of unused T-85 X-Wings and support shuttles, under light guard. It was a Republican Fleet outpost that had fallen to the First Order, but to which the First Order wasn’t devoting a ton of manpower. It also was likely a trap, because the First Order had to know how badly the Resistance would want a bunch of well-maintained craft like that.

And it was like something inside Finn had woken up. He was more confident than on Starkiller, less afraid, even though this couldn’t be much less dangerous. It was like he could see his enemies’ minds, and he knew what they were expecting.

What they were expecting wasn’t him.

He went in and laid charges, he and the four quietest of his people. An hour later, half of them stormed a back entrance, five minutes before all the charges blew, one each at every door. In the haze and chaos, the other half of them walked in the front entrance, made it to the control room, and shut down all power except the loudspeaker.

After that it was a matter of mopping up and waiting for the trap to spring. Finn pulled all his people in, and waited for his own reinforcements. It was like he could feel the star destroyer that had been lying in wait, as it approached to answer the base’s distress call and spring the trap. He reached out with his mind and felt it, felt the smug satisfaction of its commander, who had been waiting for this, who had expected it any day now. And he also felt the minds of his reinforcements; the cruiser they’d acquired full of midshipmen, now fully-manned with adult Resistance members. It was bigger than the star destroyer. It was better-equipped than the star destroyer. And Leia Organa was on it, and she had a knack that maybe nobody else had noticed, but Finn had; she was really good at making people not notice things she didn’t want them not to notice.

Finn wasn’t really sure what was really true about being Force-sensitive and what was just in his imagination, but he’d started feeling like he could do the same trick. And so he did. He bent all his attention on that star destroyer, making the minds on it all think only of how surprised those Resistance fighters on that base were going to be when they suddenly showed up.

Unnoticed, the Resistance cruiser pinned the First Order destroyer neatly between itself and the orbital satellite, which had one gun and fired a shot across the destroyer’s bows.

Finn hailed the destroyer. “I know you think you got me where you want me,” he said. “But you should know who you’re dealing with.” He activated the video part of the comm link, and was rewarded with the sight of a colonel he’d worked with before. “Ah, Colonel Narrix. You knew me as FN-2187, if you ever noticed me at all. I don’t expect you did.”

“FN,” the colonel said slowly, frowning in puzzlement. His mouth started to from the _two_.

“I go by Finn now,” Finn interrupted, grinning. “And I’m in charge. Ask Captain Phasma, if she made it off the Starkiller.”

The colonel’s expression changed, going closed-off and grim. “She did,” he said. “I know who you are. I don’t think we’re going to bother trying to recapture this base.”

“Before you get too trigger-happy,” Finn said, “I think you should know, I was expecting you. You should perhaps re-check your proximity sensors.”

“Colonel,” someone just offscreen said, in a panicked voice, “a targeting system is locked onto us in two dozen locations.”

Finn’s grin went brighter. “You’re about to meet Leia Organa,” he said. “I assure you, it’s every bit the honor you’d expect. I’ll sign off so you can speak to her instead.” And he ended the comm.

 

They captured the star destroyer _and_ the base without firing another shot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ugh apparently it's canon that in Star Wars, pilots maintain their own craft, and that is just _wrong_ to me. I'm trying to work around it.  
>  _____  
> Also I made some last-minute edits to chapter 3 right before posting it and only just now noticed that those didn't save. I definitely didn't mean for Luke to say Finn wasn't as strong as Rey, but I don't remember what I had him say instead. Don't edit straight in the AO3 window, kids!


	5. Mi Desentegrador Es Descompuesto

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finn has a lot on his plate. Rey and Poe are making great progress. Things are not going Luke's way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies in advance: real life is hectic and it was only as I was putting this chapter up that I remembered I'd meant to get someone to look over my terrible high-school Spanish. It's not plot-significant, it's meant to stand in for Space Spanish anyway, but I still meant to do better and I'm sorry. Corrections welcome but don't feel obligated.
> 
> "Mi desentegrador es descompuesto" is supposed to mean "my blaster is broken" but is mostly just an inside-joke with some RL friends of mine, because my Mom was the local high school Spanish teacher [I know, it only compounds my shame at being sort of crap at the language myself]; said in a robotic tone of voice, "mi tocadiscos es descompuesto" was the only Spanish phrase one friend of mine knew how to pronounce, and it means "My record player is broken" and is just polysyllabic enough to be hilarious for pure phonetic reasons. And since I'm an idiot, it seemed to me like that would be a hilarious phrase for Rey to have memorized.
> 
> Also: I am behind on answering comments! This is solely because of real-life hecticness, because I can read comments via email or on my phone, but to answer them I'd have to log in on a work computer or laboriously type on my phone, and I'm just not equal to the task. So I am reading them and being delighted, but I have not had time to sit and answer the way I would like to. Please don't take this to mean that I am not delighted. Because I am, and beyond that, even, I am fundamentally affirmed and motivated. <3 <3 <3 <3 I will get to them soon!  
> _________________

  


There wasn’t a lot of time to bask in success, and Finn was kind of glad of it. People were looking at him differently, treating him differently, and it made him uncomfortable. He liked being smiled at more, and was delighted to smile back, but there were calculations behind people’s eyes that hadn’t been there before, and it made him uneasy.

The first matter was that JN-4002, the TIE pilot, had been cleared to move to Nellia with Teeny, so that he could work more closely with the task force that was trying to collect all the defectors who had been sent by the same program. The pilot seemed to know more high-level things about it than Teeny.

JN-4002 had, with a strange sort of reluctance, opted to go by his callsign, Bolt. Finn told him he could keep thinking about it and change his mind later.

They’d had to surgically remove a tracker from near Bolt’s spine, between his shoulder blades. He’d known it was there, but hadn’t mentioned it until they’d discovered it. He had refused sedation, and had spent the operation with a local nerve block, teeth gritted and hands clutched motionless in a blanket.

To call him high-strung was to severely understate the matter. Bolt was on a constant knife-edge of hypervigilance, never actually sitting still. Finn wasn’t sure he ever slept properly. Teeny had reported, with a faintly disturbed air, that he slept upright with his knees pulled to his chest wedged into the corner of the room.

Finn had to abandon having his own private little hut, which had been a sweet idea on Poe’s part but was impractical. He managed to get a bigger circular building with interior partitions, and that left him a little room if more people showed up, but also let him cram bunks in and give them at least curtains between them, in a kind of compromise between what the First Order people were used to and what the Resistance people expected. There were a few other huts like this, though, being used sort of barracks-style— mostly by some of the non-humans for whom solitude was unnatural, but some of them were just people who were used to living in close quarters with others. So Finn’s request was easily-enough filled.

Bolt didn’t transfer well. Teeny was happy, and acting more and more normal, by Resistance standards by the day— Karé was now treating her as a friend, and it was really letting Teeny’s personality blossom in unexpected and delightful ways.

But Bolt was falling apart, and Finn couldn’t tell why. Everyone was being kind to him. It took the pilots a few startled double-takes to get past his uncanny resemblance to Poe (it wasn’t just Finn that saw it; Snap Wexley almost fell off his chair, which startled Bolt very badly), but once they did, they were friendly enough to him, tried to draw him out about what TIE fighters were like.

But Bolt was just too on-edge to make conversation. A few times, a hint of personality sparkled through, the more tantalizing for its rarity— he laughed, once, at a truly filthy joke Ziff made, and it utterly transformed his face— but mostly he sat in tense silence, twitching at any sound, raptly watching whoever was speaking as if he expected them to pronounce his sudden doom at any time.

Finn was certain that it was that something was keeping the man from sleeping. He was increasingly physically clumsy, as well, unsteady and off-balance. He ate almost nothing, displaying no appetite whatsoever. He’d had a full medical checkup, and they’d found nothing unusual (beyond the tracker they’d removed), but Finn made it a priority to book him another one, first thing the next morning.

In the meantime, he was going to try to make sure the man slept. As soon as he finished his work for the day.

They were trying to triangulate other planets the defectors might have wound up on. They were also trying to consolidate and redistribute the seized assets from the base that Finn had led the capture of, _and_ work out what to do exactly with all of the prisoners from the seized cruiser. That, it had been decided, was _not_ Finn’s job, and he was sort of guilty about how glad he felt about that. They’d need him, later, to help debrief some of the prisoners, but for the most part they were going to leave him directly uninvolved.

After dark, Finn took his datapad and retired to the new hut, where Teeny had already sacked out in the farthest bunk, curtain drawn, soft snores a now-familiar soundtrack. Bolt was crammed into the bunk closest to the door, and he had the curtain open so he was visible, sitting as Teeny had described with his knees pulled up and his back shoved against the headboard of the bed. It was still raining, as it had been intermittently for weeks, and the sound was soft and pleasant on the roof.

“Hey,” Finn said, seeing Bolt’s eyes glitter in the dim lighting. He’d managed to scrounge up some pretty-colored fabric for the curtains, anyway, so it wasn’t sterile and blank in here. There was a scrap of carpet on the floor in the entryway, and the desk was made from old crates but was at least painted, and there were a couple of chairs, one an overstuffed upholstered old thing salvaged from somewhere. Mowa had produced it out of nowhere for Finn, and he was surprised at how much he liked it.

Bolt made a soft sound in wordless reply, and Finn shut the door and took off his shoes and stretched, shaking the water out of his hair and off his coat as he hung it up. “You about ready to sleep or do you wanna talk a little bit?”

Bolt leaned forward a bit, and Finn thought that odd sound might be his teeth chattering. “You cold, man? It is a little cold in here.”

“F-reezing,” Bolt admitted, and the light caught his face a little more. His skin was bloodless, ashen, and his hair was stuck to his forehead with sweat.

“You don’t look so hot,” Finn said, alarmed, and stepped toward him.

Bolt shook his head, hunching forward. Finn crossed the floor and sat on the edge of the bed. “Nn-nn,” he said thinly, shivering.

“Is it the hole they cut in you?” Finn asked, putting his arm around carefully to check the bandages at Bolt’s back. “When they pulled the tracker out? Is it infected?”

Bolt shook his head again, but flinched away from Finn’s arms. He held out one of his hands, which was curled tightly into a fist. Confused, Finn took his hand, and Bolt uncurled his fingers to show him— a stim tab, the kind you stuck to your skin to absorb medication. But it was cut in half. He pressed the tab into Finn’s hand, and it still had the adhesive-cover on it so that it wouldn’t stick, but it was noticeably leaking a little, like it wasn’t meant to have been cut in half.

“What is this?” Finn asked.

Bolt’s teeth were chattering too hard to speak, and he shook his head. After a moment he hissed, “Sss-self des-struct.”

“What,” Finn said, horrified, and pulled away to go get his comm unit, just as Bolt twitched and started to fall sideways. “Did you take something? Did you do this to yourself?”

“N-n-n,” Bolt said, as Finn caught him and held him, and he felt frail and insubstantial, all sharp bony edges and no heft. His eyes were wide and frightened and he stared up at Finn as if in supplication.

His expression looked like Poe in the video when the woman had drugged him.

“Not— my choice,” Bolt managed to say, and then his eyes rolled shut and he started to shake violently, blood coming out of his nose.

  


________________

  


“Two days of hard work,” Dameron said, sprawled elegantly over the back of the co-pilot’s chair-- the ship was tiny enough that he could get around it, but only because he could crash into the walls and fixtures. It was too small to use the wheelie chair, they’d consigned it to the storage hold. He was inexplicably graceful even when flailing around, and Rey had no idea how he did it. “And this thing is still a big hunk of garbage.”

“I know,” Rey said. “It should be fun. It always adds a certain element of spice to a journey if you’re never sure whether you’ll be abruptly exposed to hard vacuum at any particular point.”

“Hard vacuum is my favorite kind,” Dameron said. He was staring out the viewscreen, alternating looking from one eye and the other, squeezing his eyelids shut one eye at a time.

“We don’t have to leave yet if you’re not sure you’re up for it,” Rey said.

He shook his head. “We’ve been lucky so far but it’s only luck, it won’t hold. Eventually they’ll track us down. Someone will have seen us, or you.”

Rey nodded, conceding that. “I mostly need you to do the math for the first little while anyway,” she said. “I can fly it.”

“I can fly anything,” Dameron said, looking around the interior of the ship, “but that’s the kind of thing a man says to himself about cool shit, and never really examines when it comes to the actual hunks of junk that apparently still operate in this galaxy.”

“Don’t think I’m not still jealous that you got to fly a TIE fighter,” Rey said.

“Straight into the ground,” Dameron said, giving her a jaunty finger-gun gesture, “and don’t you forget it.”

She laughed. He was improving, he really was, but it looked like a long uphill battle before he’d be able to walk unassisted, let alone fly. She wasn’t able to spend as long as she’d like working on regrowing his inner ear structures properly; it drained her too much, and she needed to be wary. She was exhausted. He had been studiously avoiding the bed, sleeping in the co-pilot’s chair or on the floor in what seemed like inadequately-short stretches. She was too tired to fight him on it.

“I bet it went into the ground really fast and agile-ly,” Rey said. “If that’s a word.”

“I’m sure that’s a word,” Dameron said. “In my defense, we got shot kind of a lot. If there hadn’t been so much shooting I probably could have landed it a little better.” He’d spent most of his time cleaning and sprucing up the inside of the ship. His ability to focus on things close-up had improved a lot, though at a cost of a lot of crippling headaches she’d had to fix. Muscle tension headaches, mostly, and she was a little worried he was doing himself damage. But the ship needed all the work they could spare; he hadn’t just made it prettier inside, he’d also fixed almost all of the interior systems and wiring. There had been a lot of vaths’ nests, and some of them would have made the life support pretty dicey. Not the kind of thing to discover _after_ takeoff.

“Finn told me how brilliant you were at flying it,” she said. She was kind of-- weirdly nervous. It wasn’t like she hadn’t just spent about a week solid in this guy’s constant company, hadn’t seen his mind from the inside, hadn’t held him in her arms and waited for the shaking to subside. For some reason it mattered to her that he didn’t hate this ship. Even though it wasn’t hers and his opinion of it was immaterial. “But. I mean. You’re a real pilot, and all.”

“They even gave me a certificate thing,” he said sardonically, turning to look at her, but he turned too fast and she saw him miss his hand-hold on the wall, so she darted forward and grabbed him around the waist to steady him. It kept him from falling on the floor but it knocked them both into the wall, staggering, and he laughed. “Sorry, sorry.”

“No,” she said, “no, not at all,” and disentangled herself from him, carefully pressing him back against the wall. He held his hands up, away from her, as if he thought she’d be upset by him touching her. He was always very careful not to touch her more than he needed to, which was either sweet and respectful or sort of discouraging. She’d been touched so little in her life, she instinctively shrank from it, but she had become obsessed with it, especially over these last few days of proximity. She knew she flinched whenever he touched her, but it wasn’t because she didn’t want him to, it was because she didn’t know what else to do.

So she left her hands on his chest, which was warm even through his clothes, and looked up at him. He was slight, but sturdy and solid, and he outweighed her a little, had a couple inches’ height and reach on her, but he wasn’t much bigger overall. She could look almost straight into his eyes, only tilting her head up a little. “I’m okay,” he said, and brought his hands down to press them against the wall behind himself. “It’s all right.”

“I just don’t want you to fall,” she said, and then it seemed to be getting weird so she pulled her hands away from him. The ship was pretty well loaded, she’d just topped off the water tanks, and it was just a matter of reeling in the solar arrays from the last top-up charge until they could get to the nearest trading post for more fuel. They hadn’t figured out yet how they were going to do that. She’d wheedled some fuel out of the yardmaster, but she was afraid to push her luck. Apparently fuel wasn’t the kind of thing you could put onto your grandfather’s account; it needed cash payment up front to get in any quantity. It wasn’t something she’d need just for repairs-- a little, to fire up the engines, but not enough to go any distance, because why would she need that to just fix up a ship?

She could see how to push, in the yardmaster’s mind, to confuse him, to make him think she’d paid him, but the whole thing made her queasy. From there it was such a small step to hurting people. It seemed like a slippery slope.

Dameron was looking down, not at her, and his eyelashes were thick and dark against his cheekbones. “Well,” he said, “thanks.”

“So,” she said. “That’s-- that should be it, pretty much.”

“Oh,” he said, perking up a little. “Should I start preflight checks?”

“Sure,” she said. “I still have to do-- the solar arrays and the landing gear and stuff. But you could get started.”

He lowered himself into the copilot’s seat with a profound sigh of relief, closing his eyes and reeling in place a little. Then he opened his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Commencing preflight checks.”

She watched as he poked at the control board a moment, interested-- she’d noted that the trained pilots had a more formal series of steps they always followed. Her simulator had shown them to her, but not in great detail, and she’d always been a little haphazard about them to the point that being around formally-trained pilots made her self-conscious.

The control board didn’t respond, and he poked it with a little more frustration, then said, with elaborate patience, “Is there maybe a kill switch?”

“Oh,” Rey said, starting forward. “Right.” She got down and crawled under the interface, flipping the switch over-- it was there to prevent any automated systems from starting up and draining the power cells while the ship was parked. She’d had it disengaged so they could see what they were doing during the repairs, but she’d thrown it to make sure the ship took a full charge off the solar panels, this last little while. “I should go roll up the solar arrays.”

“Can’t we do that from in here?” he asked, eyebrows pulling together and lips pursing. Fair enough, he’d been asleep when she’d built them. He’d passed out in that chair and she’d worked outside so she wouldn’t wake him up.

She shook her head. “Not all of them,” she said. “There are some that can deploy from inside but-- the auxiliaries only work if you literally hang them out yourself.”

He whistled. “That’s impressively janky,” he said. “I thought I’d learned a lot in the Resistance but clearly, you have a lot to teach me.”

She flushed; she was a desert rat scavenger and he was usually too much of a gentleman to call attention to it, but it was true. “I thought it was better for--” She was too embarrassed to finish the sentence, and fled, face burning. It was probably for the best that he’d still been too out of it to see the literal garbage she’d built those solar arrays out of.

When she came back he had a holo-array pulled up and was going methodically through the checklist, the way the simulators had always said to and she’d never figured out how to. None of the simulators had ever included equipment failures, so there had never been consequences for skipping proper checks or doing start-up in the wrong order, which she could see now was a perhaps fatal flaw. One of these days she was going to die because she forgot to secure her landing gear flaps prior to takeoff, or something.

Dameron looked up as she came back into the cockpit, brushing her dirty hands on the sides of her pants. “Hey,” he said, looking concerned, “I didn’t mean it was _bad_ that they were jankety, I was impressed. You rigged something yourself?”

“I made them out of salvage,” she said, and her cheeks were burning again.

“That’s really cool,” he said. “That’s-- it’s just really cool. I can’t even really fix my own bird, I already told you that. I got almost no training in that at all. All I know is how to do the checklists and follow the basic shit in the manual and how to tell the mechanics which lights didn’t flip green.”

“Everything I know I learned from simulators,” she confessed. “And the simulators told you to do preflight checks but assumed you’d have a teacher to tell you what those were.”

Understanding crossed his face. “Oh,” he said, “oh wow. I figured you learned from flying on-planet.”

“A little,” she said, “but mostly-- there was a simulator, and it was too broken for salvage really, nothing of particular value, so I got it sort of working, and I just-- I played every module it had.”

He shook his head slightly, mouth a little bit open, and she was terrified he was making fun of her. She knew simulators were not the same as real flying. What if he thought she wasn’t really up to flying this thing? Nobody’d ever looked at her like that, precisely, and she wasn’t sure what his face was saying. She’d never-- really cared what anyone thought, before Finn, before Luke, and now Dameron. This was new, and it was exhausting. “That’s amazing,” he said. “That’s-- incredible. You know, it’s an honor to co-pilot for you.”

“Stop,” she said, face burning; she couldn’t tell if he were serious, and it was just too much. “I’m-- I’ll do my best.” Cowardly, she fled again, finding an excuse in double-checking the landing gear retractor doors to make sure they’d really close, because she wasn’t sure the interior atmospheric seals would hold if they didn’t.

She came back and Dameron was standing, feet on the seat, legs braced against the back of the co-pilot’s seat to reach a control array up above the viewscreen, and he turned his head to look at her and set himself off, and fell off the seat. She caught him, but he was still heavier than her and she wasn’t braced enough to keep him from slamming her back into the pilot’s seat.

“Oh no,” he said, “no no, oh Rey, I’m sorry, next time just let me fall, it’ll do less damage.” He tried to get up but was still violently dizzy, so she wrapped her arms around his chest and held him, sitting on her lap.

“You didn’t hurt me,” she said, “I landed in the seat, it’s fine.”

He made a half-hearted effort to get up, but she held him, and he put his hands around her arms where they were locked around his chest. “I’m so tired of this,” he said, tension sighing out of his frame. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she said.

He took a long deep breath in, and she could feel it inflate his lungs, could feel his ribs expanding. His hair smelled pleasantly sweet, like the stuff he put in it after washing it.

“I’m not mocking you,” he said. “You spend enough time in my head, you know I’m not mocking you.” He tried to get up again, and she let him this time. He dragged himself to a standing position, and staggered to the co-pilot’s chair, where he sat down heavily.

She considered him for a long moment, and peeled herself out of the chair-- she probably would have bruises across the backs of her thighs, he’d mushed her into the hard edge of the seat-- to stand up. “Don’t get back up on that chair,” she said, “let me do it, and maybe while you’re at it you can teach me properly how to follow a pre-flight checklist.”

This smile was softer. “Okay,” he said.

 

_______

  


“Stimulants,” Finn said wearily, slumping into the chair opposite Organa’s at her desk. “A kind of stimulants nobody else uses, just the First Order, because they cause dependency and long-term use can lead to organ damage. He was dependent on them and whoever sent him out here, as best as I could piece together, had given him a small supply of them that he concealed, and had told him that if he tapered off the dosage he’d be all right.”

“But he wasn’t all right,” Organa said, frowning.

“No,” Finn said, “and no matter what he did, Kalonia says, he wouldn’t have been all right. The method of dependency is such that you can’t actually avoid withdrawal symptoms entirely by stepping down the dosage.”

“So he overdosed?” Organa asked.

“No,” Finn said. “He under-dosed. He had stepped his dosage down to the point that he was no longer taking enough of it to stave off withdrawal symptoms. Kalonia is kicking herself but I don’t think she could have caught this.”

“Did you know?” Organa asked, and immediately corrected herself. “I mean, in general, were you aware of this kind of thing? It sounds like the dependency is a standard practice.”

Finn rubbed the back of his neck. “I think I knew about it once,” he said, “and a reconditioning took it out, because it resonates with me but I don’t actually remember it.”

“Ah,” she said, grimacing a little.

“Complicates things,” Finn conceded. He was cut off from finishing his sentence by a quiet alert. Organa tapped her datapad, and made a grim face. “What?” he asked warily.

“Oh,” she said, and sighed. “Arana’s back.”

“I wasn’t aware of his mission,” Finn said.

Organa shook her head. “He was supposed to be seeing to some rookies’ training, but he went off AWOL for nearly a week, so I recalled him and have been waiting for him to come back. I have a suspicion where he went, and I wish he’d talked to me about it.”

Finn considered that. “You don’t think he was— he’d—“ he couldn’t even say it, couldn’t even seriously entertain the thought of Arana having conflicted loyalties.

“No,” she said, “it was personal business, I am sure, but he should have talked to me.”

The comm buzzed. “Arana’s landed,” Nerro’s voice said.

“Send him in immediately,” Organa said. “Have him hand off the vehicle shut-down protocols, I want him in here right away.”

“Should I go?” Finn asked, pushing the chair back.

“No,” Organa said, “stay.” She set her datapad down and laced her fingers together very carefully. “The thing is,” she said, “sometimes you have to be aware of your shortcomings as a leader, and realize that complicated situations can easily escalate to the point that they’re entirely out of hand. Being kind isn’t my strong suit, Finn.”

He was puzzling that through when Arana came through the door, looking battered and dispirited, with one of the airfield’s guards escorting him with a drawn laser rifle. Organa stood, and Finn stood as well, and watched her size up the situation, look at the guard, and then gaze at Arana with a long, penetrating look.

“You can go, Kerez,” she said to the guard, who nodded, put her weapon up, and turned and left.

After another long moment, during which Arana stared at the floor, Organa came around the desk, approached Arana, and took both of his hands in hers. “Iolo,” she said softly. “How are they?”

A shiver went through Iolo, and he said, thickly, “I couldn’t-- I had to go in person, General.”

“I understand,” Organa said. “Iolo, I understand, but I wish you had talked to me. We’ve had more news since then.”

Finn watched, mystified, as Iolo’s face crumpled. Tears leaked out down his face. “What news?” he asked, shivering.

“Luke got there before the bounty hunters,” Leia said. “Poe’s safe in a hospital. Rey’s protecting him.”

Iolo shuddered again, and Organa let go of his hands and embraced him. He sobbed, covering his face. “But the,” he managed to ask.

“We don’t know yet how badly damaged he is,” Organa said, “but at least we know the damage isn’t fatal.”

Iolo sobbed, and Organa looked at Finn over his shoulder. “Iolo went to Poe’s family,” she said, to Finn. “His father, and his aunt. His father is the harbormaster out at the Yavin station, and Poe hasn’t spoken to him since he left the Republic Navy.”

“I shouldn’t have,” Arana said, trying to collect himself, “but-- I couldn’t-- I had to--”

“I understand,” Organa said, “but that means we urgently have to send another message. You told them bounty hunters had him, yes? That was what we assumed at the time. I didn’t want to send an incomplete message, Arana. I wish you had spoken to me.”

Arana nodded, hands over his face as he tried to collect himself. Organa was holding him gently by the upper arms, head tilted as she looked up into his face. Finn was still trying to wrap his head around the thought that Poe had a father.

Finally Arana managed a long, unsteady exhale. “Kes wants to join the Resistance,” he said.

Finn had never seen Organa look quite so _surprised_.

 

_______

 

Takeoff was bad. As soon as the ship started to move, Dameron went white and wrapped his hands around the sides of his chair. Which would have been less bad if this weren’t really a two-person-operation ship. “I can’t retract the landing gear from here,” Rey said.

“I got it,” Dameron said, prying his hand out of the seat and reaching out, and missing the switch. It took him three tries to throw it, and he had his teeth gritted.

“We could still abort,” Rey said. They shouldn’t. She wasn’t sure the yardmaster would really be okay with them taking this thing.

“Please,” he said, “please, no, we need to do this, I can do this.” He was closing his eyes alternately, looking through only one at a time, and she could see that sweat was sheening his face.

“If you say so,” she said, and hauled grimly at the controls as the ship shuddered and shrieked its way up out of the atmosphere. “I need you to disengage the airfoils.”

“Yes,” he said, “I see that.” He was audibly gasping to breathe, and she could tell he was about to throw up. But he got the lever slid properly, grimacing, and swallowed hard a couple of times. She managed to get them onto a flight trajectory, and as soon as he could let go of his side of the control yoke he scrambled for the airsick kit they’d stashed under his seat.

She was too busy handling the controls, which were not leveling out nearly as easily as they should and she knew next time they set down she’d absolutely have to get under the plating and tweak the tension cables on the aft stabilizer, so she wasn’t just being polite and ignoring him. She was a little surprised to glance over and see that he was finished, carefully tidied-up, all mess secured.

“Feels like one of the stabilizers,” he said hoarsely. “Not like I can really tell.”

“Yeah, no, it’s the aft stabilizer,” she said, “but if it was going to break it already would have, and we’d be probably dead instead of discussing it, so--” She grinned, cheerful at the realization that they probably weren’t going to die. Well, imminently anyway.

“I don’t want to consider the landing,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, “by then I imagine we’ll have other things to worry about. I’m counting this a victory.”

He gave her a wan half-smile. “Last time I was motion-sick I was still a teenager,” he said.

“Well,” she said. “You’re brain-damaged. Has it settled down at all?”

“Yeah,” he said, “but I wouldn’t let me steer, if I were you.”

“Instruments are reading fine,” she said. “We’re free of the atmosphere. Steadying out.”

“Looks good,” he said, and she could see he was reading the instrument panel with one eye at a time.

“It does,” she said. “I’m amazed. If the life support system weren’t working I think we’d know by now.”

A warning light came on, and a little error message popped up into the interface. “You jinxed it,” Poe said, and tilted his head, blinking really hard, and tried again. “Uh-- nope, it’s not the life support system. It’s the gravity.”

“Ah,” Rey said. “I’ve, ah, not had a lot of experience in zero-grav.”

“I have,” Dameron said. “It’s both much weirder and much less bad than you’d think. Oh, my hair is hilarious, you can console yourself with that-- if we lose gravity on this thing you can laugh at me.”

She glanced over at him. “Your hair,” she said. His hair seemed-- really normal, a little wavy, sort of pretty. He had little jars of things in his toiletry kit, _styling products_ he’d said, and he put things in his hair and combed it and was generally careful with it in a way she’d never seen before and was surreptitiously fascinated by. She wondered what her hair would look like if she did anything else to it, but she was too self-conscious to let on that she had no idea about these things. Fortunately he hadn’t said anything. He spent far more time on personal grooming than she did, and she thought perhaps she was missing out. He couldn’t hold his hands steady enough to shave his face, though, so he was growing a beard, and he hadn’t complained but she could tell he really didn’t like it. He rubbed at it a lot and made faces.

“Sticks up,” he said. “I dunno, I haven’t really looked at it, but last time I was in zero-grav with a copilot they didn’t stop laughing. Every damn time they looked at me.”

“Huh,” she said, eyeing him sidelong. He dismissed the error.

“Well,” he said in a moment, “it hasn’t failed yet.”

She established a course, fired the thrusters, and looked grimly at the readouts. “Hmm, as we expected,” she said, “not a lot of fuel for a hyperspace jump.”

Dameron nodded, but she could see he was having trouble looking at the screen; his eyes kept sliding away, and he was turning his head away too. She reached over and touched his arm. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m on course now.”

He closed his eyes and rubbed his face. “Well,” he said. “Maybe I should make dinner before the gravity gives out.”

Rey thought suddenly of the descriptions of food that had been on his datapad. She’d used their sparse funds to buy food according to lists he’d written of provisions. It would have been better if he’d bought them, but he simply wasn’t up to the task. A lot of the things he’d listed were words Rey didn’t even know. Fortunately at one of the places she’d stopped, the shopkeeper had found it endearing that she knew so little, and had given her free samples of all kinds of things, as well as giving her more food than she’d paid for. Dameron assumed she’d used the Force to trick the shopkeeper, but she hadn’t.

A lot of it was far from the preserved, dehydrated, powdered stuff she was used to. She wouldn’t have the foggiest notion how to prepare it.

The galley was just a little hotplate and counter tucked in behind the sole passenger’s seat. Dameron got himself there by his usual expedient, which consisted of just slamming into everything and hanging onto it. It was more graceful than it ought to be, almost like a dance, but he was perpetually covered in bruises he wouldn’t let her heal, dismissing it as a waste of effort. “With any luck,” he said, “I won’t set anything on fire.”

For some reason the dry humor with which he said it struck her just so, as perhaps the funniest thing she’d ever heard. “Please don’t set anything on fire,” Rey said, with a laugh and a glance back at him.

He was looking at her with a strangely wistful happy-face, smiling with his tongue caught between his teeth and his eyebrows drawn together. “You’re like a sunbeam,” he said, and turned away, pulling packaged food out of the storage cabinets. “My mom used to say that about people. Como un rayo del sol. Una luz brillante.”

Rey laughed again, this time in delighted familiarity: she knew some of those words. “Tu eres mi sol, mi luna, mis estrellas,” she said, “yo morira sin ti! Tenga piedad, mi luz.”

Dameron stared at her in what looked like dumbfounded shock. “En serio?” he said. “Hablas este lengua?”

Rey didn’t know what that meant. She put on a serious face and said, “Si no recibimos la herencia de tu padre nos moriremos de hambre!”

Dameron’s eyebrows rose slowly. Then, suddenly, he laughed, a great big sincere laugh, like she hadn’t heard out of him in a long time, maybe ever. “I know what that’s from,” he said. “It’s that godawful holonovela that everybody watches.”

“Amor Condenado,” Rey said, making sure to pronounce the strange R just as the announcer always had. It had taken her ages of practice to master it. “I had seven episodes on a broken datapad and I watched them until I had it memorized. I don’t actually speak whatever language it is, but I know some very useful phrases. Mi desentegrador es descompuesto!”

Dameron laughed until he had to lean against the cabinet, and slid down to sit on the floor. “Mi desentegrador es descompuesto,” he repeated, wheezing a little.

“Did I say it wrong?” Rey asked, leaning out of her seat to see him better. She’d never heard him laugh like that.

“No,” he said, “no, ha dicho perfectamente, you said it perfectly.” He sighed, and she giggled, which set him off again, little hitching laughs. “Mi desentegrador es descompuesto!”

“Es descompuesto,” Rey said. “It means not working, right?”

“Si,” he said, still giggling.

“That means yes,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Ah. Hoo boy. So you watched this until you memorized it but you had no idea what they were saying?”

“I mean, I got the idea, but I don’t even know what language it is,” Rey said. “Clearly you speak it, so I’m sorry if it seems like I’m making fun of it, I guess it’s your language, but--”

“Iberican,” Dameron said. “My mother and father both spoke it. A lot of us did where I grew up. It’s fairly common in some areas. It’s _kind_ of related to Basic, a little, so it’s not hard to pick up. And for some reason they make a lot of holonovelas in it and everybody watches them with translator chips. It drives me crazy, I always pull the chips out so I can hear it properly and then everybody gets mad at me because I forget to put them back.”

“Nobody else speaks it?” she asked.

“I mean, not really,” Dameron said. “Sometimes, I find somebody who does, and we shoot the shit, but, I mean.” He shrugged. “Well. General Organa does, but we don’t exactly sit around chattering a lot.” He laughed. “It’s not like I’d forget it, at this point.”

Rey thought about General Organa sitting around chattering. He was right, it didn’t really compute.

He hauled himself unsteadily up off the floor. “Mi desentegrador es descompuesto,” he said to himself, with dramatic intonation, and propped his hip against the counter so he could work. "It should be está. Mi desentegrador está descompuesto."

“I mostly figured out what was going on,” Rey said. “So I kind of knew what they were saying. It’s not like I never figured it out.”

“Oh,” Poe said, “of course. It’s pretty obvious most of the time. It’s hardly a--   _subtle_ show. Did you see the whole thing?”

“No,” Rey said, “the recordings I had stopped right when he finds out about the secret baby.”

“Secret baby!” Poe said. “I forgot that part. There’s a secret baby?”

“The secret baby is like, the whole point,” Rey said. “They were totally building up to it the entire time.”

Dameron laughed again, and he was cutting something up that smelled very strongly. “There’s always a secret baby in those things,” he said. “They’re really--” He sighed. “I sort of love and hate holonovelas, because they’re like, the biggest Iberican export to the galaxy at large, and-- I mean, there’s other shit behind it, but--  everybody watches them and thinks, like, we’re actually _like_ that. Of course we’re not! Who lives like that! Always with secret babies and passionate doomed love affairs and industrial espionage and like, dynastic betrayals? They’re overdramatic holovids meant to be escapist, they’re not a reflection of anything directly applicable!”

“They’re just fun to watch,” Rey said, confused.

“Exactly,” Dameron said. “But oh my stars! I have-- okay, you hopefully don’t know this, but I have this wild and crazy reputation, dating back to my time at the Academy. I was kind of-- it’s not like I was a celebrity, exactly, but I mean, my mom was a war hero, okay? My dad too, but my mom was flashier. People at the Academy knew about her. She was famous. So I showed up and I mean, I was just me, but I got this reputation. And to be fair, I don’t think most people think of it this way? But a lot of the, kinda, cultural weight of it?” He gestured with the knife as he spoke. “Is because I’m Iberican and so everybody thinks I’m like the stereotype. There’s this idea that Iberican-speakers are so-- so _passionate_ , and like, _sensual_ and whatever. So whatever I did, and I’m not saying I wasn’t a little wild at school but, like, that’s the prevailing culture, I just did what everybody was doing-- whatever I did just got blown up and mythologized and a big part of that is that I’m just that little bit _exotic_.” He rolled his eyes.

“That’s stupid,” Rey said.

“Well,” Poe said. He had his eyes closed now, and she realized rolling them had made him dizzy. He grimaced, then peeled one eye open and squinted tentatively through it. “And it’s not-- I mean, most people don’t think about it like that. They don’t realize. And to be fair, some people don’t even know I’m Iberican. I don’t look--” He paused, and Rey realized she was staring at him and had better look out the viewscreen once in a while. Oh, or rig a good perimeter alarm, there was probably a way to do that. She turned back to the control board and investigated the switches.

“It’s not like there’s a particular way that Ibericans look,” Dameron said after a moment’s thought. He scraped whatever he was chopping off the cutting board, and went to work on something else. “Particularly. But there are some things that read that way. And depending on my hairstyle, sometimes people don’t even notice.”

“How do Ibericans usually look?” Rey asked. “Like, if I saw one? I mean-- you just look like you, to me, I don’t know what I’d be looking for.”

“There isn’t like one particular way we look really,” Dameron said. “I mean, human, mostly? Not a lot of near-humans mixed in, though there are some-- it’s kind of not a thing either way? But there are a lot of Iberican-speakers who have darker skin and hair. And the darker your skin on a lot of planets-- well, it’s complicated, but there were some planets where humans were kind of-- segregated by pigmentation, and some where they still are? And so it’s-- the darker you are, the more,” he raised his hands and made a weird gesture like, oh, like Aurebesh quotation indicators, “ _ethnic_ people think you are. My mom was darker, and you’d see her and you’d kinda-- _know_ , y’know? My dad though, he’s from-- well, a particular group of people on a particular planet, and I look like him, and if you know, there’s a characteristic look of people from that place, but if you don’t know then it’s not that distinctive, so you might not realize just by looking at him. If I don’t let my hair curl too much I don’t look--” Poe shrugged. “He has an accent when he speaks Basic. Mom didn’t. So like. Depending how people met them, they thought they were or weren’t-- over the comms, for example, nobody knew what Mom looked like, so--  It’s-- it’s just complicated.”

“Clearly,” Rey said, digging into a promising-looking function that involved reflection sensors. It looked like this ship had been equipped with a proximity alarm. So, it should be able to autopilot with it, if she just reconnected it. “I mean, I don’t know anything about this, so it seems _very_ complicated to me, but I imagine you’re more qualified to make that judgement.”

Darker pigmentation. Finn had dark pigmentation. She felt oddly unsure about asking questions about Finn.

He laughed. “Well put,” he said. “Well, I am, and it is. Anyway. I have this whole, fucking, _mythology_ , and people are really stupid about it, and it’s fucking _racist_.”

“And it’s because of holonovelas?” Rey asked, dismayed.

“I mean, no,” he said. He’d turned the heat on under the pan, and something sizzled and smelled amazing. Rey’s stomach growled, and she redoubled her efforts to get the control panel to read from those sensors. She’d fixed at least half the sensors out there because they were important for docking too and she’d figured they’d need them. So there should be enough functioning to make this work. “Partly. A little. People have this idea entrenched in their head, of the sexy, sensual, passionate Iberican man, maybe slapping his girlfriend around, making foolish and hot-headed choices, drinking to excess, failing at his job, becoming a smuggler, you know we’re all in gangs, with tattoos and gold teeth, and-- do you know, one of my _teachers_ at the Academy said right in front of the whole class that of course Dameron would become a drug runner in the end so all of this piloting aptitude would just turn against us.”

“That’s awful,” Rey said, shocked enough to pause and turn around to look at him.

“I was really upset,” Dameron said. “I mean-- I was _really upset_. But even my friends laughed it off so, it just seemed crazy to kick up a fuss. And I’m-- it’s been ten years at least and I’m still really upset.” He rubbed his face on the forearm of the hand still holding the knife. “I don’t know if I could tell you how many people over the years have just-- expected that if I survived military service I’d wind up a rhyndo’d old beggar in a backwater trading outpost somewhere.” He glanced over at her, though his wandering eyes made it hard to tell if he was really looking at her or just at the viewscreen. “So this is especially charming for me, to prove them right after all.” The bitter twist to his features looked horribly out-of-place on his handsome face, and it moved her unexpectedly.

“No,” Rey said fiercely. “No, Poe, they weren’t right. You’re going to wind up the first person ever to get rhyndo’d and walk away from it and _spit on them_.”

He laughed, at that, and she could see then how people would describe it as like the sun coming up. When he smiled sincerely, the corners of his eyes crinkled, and it was possibly the most charming thing in the world. She tore her dazzled gaze away and went back to her wiring diagram.

“You know they made a training holovid about me?” he said after a moment, stirring the pot.

“A training holovid,” Rey said.

“Oh,” he said. “They’re really common in the Fleet. If there’s a thing you have to learn about, instead of just writing it down, or having someone tell you, they’ll make a short holovid to teach it to you. It’s really useful for things where there’s a visual component. Like, how to properly secure the tie-downs on an X-Wing parked terrestrially. There’s a method where you go over, and under, and then the tie-down fastens to a hook like so, and so they make a vid that shows someone doing it. Easier than making you go out and watch someone doing it. So we have a few, in the Resistance, that we’ve made for our specific stuff. I’ve been in some, even. No big deal, right? Very useful.”

“Okay,” Rey said. “Yeah, I suppose it would be nice to have someone show me how to do stuff.” She knew what he’d meant, she’d watched enough vids, but her tone had been too flat, she thought. He’d mistaken her confusion.

“Not everyone is as good at learning by doing as you are,” Poe said. “And I’m not being a dick, I mean that. You’re really exceptional.”

“Oh,” Rey said, squirming a little. It made her feel strange to be praised by him. It was different than when Luke did. It was nice either way, but more confusing from Poe, and she wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t lying, she could tell he was sincere. She didn’t understand how it made her feel.

“So anyway. I actually found this out, like, immediately before I left for the mission I was on when you had to rescue me.” He tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot, and put a lid on it. “I walked in and they were showing a training holovid and it was about me.”

Rey had to turn and look at him, at that. “What _about_ you?” she asked.

He made a face, and set the spoon down, turned, set his back against the cabinet and slid down to the floor again. “It was called How To Cope With Your Crush On Poe, or something like that, and it was all about how everyone wants to fuck me and shouldn’t be weird about it,” he said, rubbing his face again and looking really sad and tired.

“Oh,” Rey said, baffled, and turned back to her wiring. Aha. The sensors were active already. It was just a question of what they were sensing. They had to be calibrated. Ah. “That-- seems weird.”

“It is,” he said. “They had-- interviews. With people-- with ex-lovers of mine. Including one guy who’s since gotten killed. And it fucked me up, to see that. And he’s talking about how good I am in bed. Like-- what the fuck is that.”

“What the _fuck_ ,” Rey echoed sincerely.

Poe sighed deeply. “General Organa was in on it,” he said. “They sent her to talk to me after I ran out of there, because like, what was I supposed to do? Behind my back, they’ve been showing this thing, Force knows how long. It’s-- horrifying. And she said it wasn’t about me, it was about the mythology of me.”

“I thought General Organa was like, a mom to you,” Rey said thoughtfully.

“ _Yes_ ,” Poe said, then amended, “I mean, no, but-- it’s not the same. But. Yes. It felt like-- really personal. Like I really-- her _parents_ were Iberican, the ones who raised her anyway-- I thought she _understood_ , you know? And yet. But I mean. I figured they were mocking me, but she swears that wasn’t it at all. It’s sincere, apparently. People just-- think I’m-- some kind of-- I don’t know. Whatever they think, I’m not, and it’s not fair, I’m a _person_.”

“Of course you are,” Rey said, indignant.

He tipped his head back against the cabinet, and sighed. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for listening so patiently. It’s been really bothering me and my ability to not whine about things is at a particularly low ebb because everything is terrible.”

“Well,” Rey said, “everything _is_ objectively terrible, you’re not wrong. Thank you for telling me, because I would have been very confused to encounter such a holovid.”

“I wasn’t confused,” Poe said, “I was just really upset.”

“Understandably so,” Rey said.

“And it’s-- I can guarantee you, literally nobody involved in this realizes how fucking racist it is,” Poe said. “But it’s racist. And it’s really-- it’s hard to describe it? But specifically, specifically _that_ , is just so _specifically_ icky, in a particularly soul-killing and gross kind of way, and when it’s people you _trusted_ \-- it’s hard to talk about.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair, and sighed, soul-deep and weary. “Thank you for listening.”

“No no,” Rey said, “I’m learning a lot, don’t _thank_ me!” She found the function that would calibrate the sensors, and checked the reference table to look for proximity alarm settings, and connected the circuit and it lit up green.

Poe laughed, and peeled himself up off the floor. He missed his handhold, and staggered into the back of the passenger chair with what had to be bruising force, but caught himself before Rey could jump up to help. “Ten minutes until dinner,” he said, “it just has to cook through.”

“It smells amazing,” she said.

“See,” he said, “it’s another stereotype that Ibericans can cook, and I have to think about that whenever I volunteer for kitchen duty. I’m not an amazing cook, but I can cook at all, and everyone is very quick to make jokes about spicy food or whatever, because the cooking on some of the Iberican homeworlds makes a lot of use of spicy flavorings.”

“Oh,” Rey said. “Well. I mean. I’ve basically only ever eaten reconstituted things. So that’s all I know how to make.”

“Then this will probably blow your mind,” Poe said. “But don’t worry! I don’t actually like spicy food all that much, because we didn’t have particularly good access to the really hot spices on Yavin 4 where I grew up, whether or not that’s traditional with my parents’ people, I wouldn’t even know, and so I didn’t put anything spicy in this, because it’s just basic frijol and roz, and you don’t need to make that spicy. It’s stereotypical Iberican food and I’d never really had it until I went away with the Navy because not all Ibericans cook the same and I grew up on maiz instead of roz, but nobody cares about that and it’s a lot easier to get roz out here.” He sighed again, and smiled, a little sadly.  “So don’t worry, even if you’re only used to reconstituted food it will probably not taste gross to you.”

“It smells really good,” Rey said, “like, the opposite of gross. So I wasn’t worried.” She smiled at him. He made expressions she liked when she smiled at him. It was a strange feeling and she wasn’t sure what it was but she wanted to get used to it.

She’d branched out a fair bit in her eating habits since leaving Jakku, but she had a feeling it was possible to branch much farther. The time they’d spent on Loria had expanded her horizons enormously. What this dish, simply prepared with few ingredients, told her was that Luke wasn’t much of a cook, which was precisely what he’d said of himself.

“This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever eaten in space,” she said, after the fourth spoonful, because it was the first time she could make herself stop long enough to speak.

“That’s kind of a very specific subset of experience,” Poe said, laughing. “Damning with faint praise.”

“I’m not-- no, it’s really good,” she said. “I mean, the most amazing thing I’ve eaten ever is probably the cheese we had the other day, so this is probably in second or third place overall.”

“I made a lot,” he said. “If we lose gravity, I can’t make this kind of thing, but I can reheat leftovers.”

“I’ll try not to eat the whole thing, then,” she said.

He looked at her with unexpected solemnity. “ _You_ ,” he said fervently, “eat until you are not hungry.” It was very intense, the weight of his regard, and it went right through her in a way she hadn’t experienced before. Like being praised by him, she didn’t exactly understand it, but she wanted more of it.

“I don’t need that much,” she said, laughing.

He wasn’t laughing. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t care what we have to do, I won’t have you go to sleep hungry, young lady.”

_Oh._

“I have trouble knowing when I’m full,” she admitted. “I’ve hurt myself a couple of times.”

“Oh,” he said, expression shifting a little, eyebrows going up, intensity easing. “Well, then I won’t push you.”

“Thank you,” she said. She made herself eat the rest of what was in her bowl slowly, savoring it. “Anyway. Regardless of stereotype, it’s excellent.”

“Well,” he said, “thank you. It’s not particularly difficult or complicated. I could teach you to make it, if you like.”

“When I was shamelessly snooping through your datapad and wearing your helmet,” Rey said, “I noticed that you had a lot of-- descriptions, of-- of making food in there, and I was really enjoying reading them.”

“Recipes,” Poe said, smiling. “It’s all the recipes I’ve collected. I have a big collection. Most of them, I’ve had at least a chance to try.”

“There were a lot of words I didn’t know,” Rey said. “I really want to learn what all those words mean.”

“If we get somewhere with gravity and food we can afford to buy,” Poe said, “I will teach you how to make every single thing in that datapad.”

“Yay,” Rey cheered, delighted mostly at the expression on Poe’s face, which was indescribable and indecipherable but without a doubt positive.

“This is my main trick, though,” Poe said, gesturing at the pot. “But it’s a good trick, because the starch in the roz combines with the proteins in the frijol and then you have fairly complete nutrition, especially if you had fresh and not dried cebol to start with. If you get some citro then you’re covering most of your major nutritional groups, and you won’t get sick if you’re stuck eating this and only this for a long time.”

“I ate the same thing every day for fifteen years,” Rey said, “and I was glad to get it, so all of this is like a flavor explosion to me.”

“Stars,” Poe said, looking suddenly stricken, “it just makes me want to hug you. You poor thing. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be condescending.”

“It’s all right,” Rey said. She sort of wanted him to hug her. “I’m all right. I mean-- at least I remember-- sort of, that I had-- my family. Finn doesn’t.”

Poe looked desperately sad, at that. “I know,” he said.

“Well,” Rey said, more brightly. “I got the proximity alarm system working. Autopilot is go!”

“Oh,” he said, looking over at the control screen. Time spent not trying to focus close-up had benefited him; he could look at it with both eyes, and seemed to be focusing better. “Hey, cool.”

“I thought so,” she said. “Means I can work on your brain holes some more.”

“My favorite thing,” he said, but the crooked smile he gave her was sweet nonetheless.

 

_______

  


Finn concentrated very hard on not letting his leg jiggle impatiently as Wexley went over the results from their check-ins at the various resettlement camps. He had about fifty other things he needed to be doing, either urgent things or things he just wanted to have out of the way before Poe and Rey came back, _any day now_ he’d see them again and waiting was agony-- but this was important and he had to pay attention to it.

Skywalker came in; Finn felt him before he saw him, a solid presence at the door. Organa turned her head slightly; she clearly felt him too. Finn wasn’t under as much observation, so he was free to turn and look straight at the guy.

Skywalker was supposed to have Chewie, R2, Rey, and Poe with him. But he was alone. This wasn’t in itself a bad sign; Poe was undoubtedly going to need medical attention. But, concentrating a little, Finn could feel that Skywalker wasn’t as tranquil as he looked. He was upset about something, or unsettled.

Skywalker saw Finn looking, and made a face. Kind of a grimace. Finn frowned, and sat forward, any chance of listening to the end of Wexley’s report shattered. Belatedly, Skywalker tried to project reassurance at him, but Finn could pretty clearly see that it was bullshit. He raised his eyebrows and settled back into his seat, turning his attention back to Wexley.

“Thank you, Snap,” Organa said. “Now, Luke, I see you’ve returned, but we were expecting you to have some company with you!”

“Yes,” Skywalker said, and came fully into the room. “I was expecting the same. But it seems that when R2-D2 and Chewbacca finished their mission, and came back to retrieve Rey and Dameron, they weren’t there.”

“I thought they were in a hospital,” Organa said. “You said you left Poe in the care of a doctor you trusted.” She was superficially angry, but Finn could tell it was because she was afraid.

Well, so was he. The bounty on Poe’s head was sky-high, and it was a lot of temptation for anyone, and Poe was clearly not in a state where he could effectively be a fugitive. And Finn had pointed this out at the time, but sending Chewbacca and R2 off on a mission, no matter how important, had left Rey and Poe without any way off the planet if things had gone sour, if the bounty hunters had found them, if the First Order had found them.

“I did,” Luke said. “It was easy enough to find which of the orderlies had sold them out to bounty hunters, but here’s the thing: the bounty hunters came to collect them and they were already gone. Poe was well enough that Rey had taken him on an outing that day, and they never came back.”

“The bounty hunters cut out the middle-man once they knew what planet he was on,” Organa said, disgusted. “It’s the oldest trick in the book.”

“If bounty hunters had tried to take Rey,” Skywalker said, “I would know about it.”

Organa gazed calmly at him for a moment, the kind of calm when you were so angry nothing moved anymore. “And they didn’t leave any sign, or message.”

“No,” Skywalker said. “But the trackers the orderly had planted on Dameron’s person were found in the bumper of a random citizen’s speeder. So it’s not likely they wound up there by accident. Clearly Rey and Poe knew they were betrayed.”

“Where could they have gone?” Organa asked.

Skywalker shook his head slowly. “I couldn’t feel either of them anywhere,” he said, “so it’s fair to say they got off-planet somehow. Under their own power, which means they’ll attempt to contact us soon.”

“One hopes,” Organa said, frowning.

“I understand your concern for Dameron,” Skywalker said, “but Rey can handle herself, and I daresay with Dameron’s knowledge and her abilities, they’ll do just fine. Still, I would rather find them, and sooner rather than later; Dameron’s chances for a full recovery are kind of based on prompt care.”

Finn’s stomach turned over, and he steadied himself against it. “So how do we find them?” he asked.

“Well,” Skywalker said. “We work out where they’re likely to be, and look there, and listen for bounty hunter chatter, because that’s who else is looking for them. It’s common knowledge now that Dameron got rhyndo’d. The doc said his condition had improved remarkably, but he was still displaying symptoms. He wouldn’t be able to hide his condition.”

Finn sat forward. “So we listen for rumors,” he said. “We put it out that we’re looking for him too. Can we offer a bounty too?”

“We don’t have half a million,” Organa said. “If we did, I’d pay it, but we don’t. And it would just start a bidding war.”

“Oh,” Finn said, “it doesn’t have to be competitive.” Something struck him. “Hey, where’s BB-8?”

Skywalker looked resigned. “Ey won’t come out of the X-Wing,” he said. “Took it a little hard.”

“I,” Finn said, on a long exhale, “can imagine.”

  


It was a much different meeting that night in Organa’s quarters. She had a hut similar to the one Finn had now; the walls were as tall as she was, and she had a woven tapestry in gorgeous shades of green and yellow as a partition down the middle. The part you could see from the door was a sitting area, all on cushions around a low table with a little catalysis heater in it.

Finn had half-expected there’d be a number of senior staff here, but when he came in, it was just Organa and Skywalker sitting by the heater, both barefoot. Organa was wearing a soft, unstructured robe of embroidered fabric, and her hair was down, which Finn had never even thought to imagine. It was long, and mixed brown and gray, and looked smooth and soft.

He took a hint, though, and took his shoes off before coming into her hut. It wasn’t something he knew anything about, but he had noticed that to some people it mattered if you wore shoes into certain spaces or not. He hadn’t been in anyone’s hut in a long time except for his own, and Poe’s. He still slept in Poe’s, as a last resort. Sometimes the fading scent in the sheets was enough to trick his mind and let him sleep, when Teeny’s snoring was too much.

“Come, sit,” Organa said. “Tea?”

Finn basically never refused food, because it was always significant somehow. “Please,” he said, “I’d love some.”

She poured him a tiny cup, from an ornate set, and he took it and sat on a cushion like they were sitting, and looked attentive.

“So you’re Force-sensitive,” Skywalker said. “That means you should be able to feel Rey.”

Finn considered that. “She has a feeling in my mind,” he said, “and it’s brighter than most other people, when she’s nearby, but I can’t feel anything right now. Mostly I just feel you two.”

Skywalker nodded. “It’s hard to do at a distance,” he said. Organa sipped her tea, and Finn watched how it was done from the corner of his eye, so he could copy her manners. She held the saucer in one hand, and the cup in the other.

“The General can feel her,” Finn said. “She said so.”

“Yes,” Skywalker said. “As can I. But I can’t tell where she is, from this great a distance. How close would you say you can feel her?”

Finn shook his head. “Like, across the room close,” he said, “not planet-level close.”

“Still, it’s something,” Skywalker said. “We can work with that.”

Finn sipped thoughtfully at his tea, which was rich and smoky tasting, unlike anything he’d ever had before. He was careful to only take a tiny bit, and then he set it back down on the saucer, holding it like Organa was now, both in one hand. “So you said I was Force-sensitive,” he said finally. “That doesn’t mean I should be a Jedi, though, does it?”

Skywalker smiled very slightly. He had kind eyes, and wasn’t at all the stern, remote figure Finn had expected. He was certainly nothing like Kylo Ren, or any of his knights, which was a welcome relief. “You don’t have to do anything,” he said. “The Force is every bit as strong with my sister as with me, but she’s never sought any kind of training for it specifically. On the other hand, some of the most effective Jedi knights were, themselves, not particularly strong with the Force. There is much you can do without following the Jedi path. I have a feeling your Force abilities have been suppressed, or at least prevented from manifesting. Training could draw them out; you might be very powerful indeed. But you don’t have to. I would recommend spending a little time with me to see just how much control you can get over it, but you don’t have to apprentice yourself.”

“This is very different from what Luke once told _me_ ,” Organa said, rolling her eyes a little, but she looked fond.

“My perspective on many things has changed,” Skywalker said, and he mostly looked sad.

Finn nodded slightly. He’d heard at least snippets of the tragic tale of what had befallen the Jedi school, enough to know it wasn’t a good story. “I’d like that,” he said. “I don’t-- I like what I’m doing here, I don’t want to be a Jedi. I think I’d know if I was really-- that powerful?”

Skywalker did not nod, or shake his head, or give Finn any kind of answer to that, and neither did Organa. “I could teach you a few focusing techniques, then,” Skywalker said. “See if we can shape this into anything you can use.” He set down his cup and settled himself into a more comfortable position.

“Oh,” Finn said. “Right _now_.”

“Well,” Skywalker said. “Time is at a bit of a premium.”

Finn nodded, and put down the teacup. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get started.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm re-evaluating whether I want to put in another story break at chapter 6 or not. it made sense before, but then I added subplots and the structure changed. Also coming up with titles is a massive pain in the ass and I just don't know if I'm equal to it. At any rate.  
> There are about 75k more words after chapter 6 but I haven't begun to break them down into chapters yet. Plus the subplots I added need finishing. Oh lord. I keep telling myself I wrote this story already and it just needs polishing, and then I tuck in and realize I've just made it 10k longer. I SWEAR IT IS COHERENT. _Don't look at me like that I could stop any time I wanted._
> 
> Hilarious, unrelated note: my niece and nephews are visiting from a great distance, and the oldest boy is 8 and is reading all the Greg Rucka junior Star Wars novelizations with rapt attention. I maaaaay wind up with a buddy, or at least an excuse to buy/read all the Rucka stuff.  
> (My boyfriend-type dude asked me in mock-seriousness, "is Lego Star Wars canon?" I told him it was. The 4-year old recites herself Lego A New Hope in the back seat of the car all the time. You know how preliterate kids "read" books to themselves? She likes to do interpretive dances in her car seat, aided by said half-memorized books.)


	6. Is There A Mirror In Your Pocket?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Poe teaches Rey cheesy pickup lines, because he has A Plan. Leia infodumps some insight into Bolt and Poe's uncanny resemblance. Finn also comes up with A Plan. And then the story ends, so I can start the sequel in a fresh spot. I just need a title and a total rewrite of chapter 1. NO BIG DEAL right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to put more into this chapter, but couldn't fit it, and didn't have time. HOWEVER, I did get one of the prequels published:[ The Lost Kings](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7224724), which deals with how Kes Dameron and Shara Bey met. It's got it all, if by "it all" you mean lots of sex and some pining and gratuitous abuse of the miscommunication trope.   
> And this story will pick up again in a week when I have a chance to organize and title the next bit! Unless I can scrape a bonus update, but I do not have time to create the sequel as a new story-- this is stolen time wherein I was meant to be doing something else as it is. So, sorry, but it's a pause as I get my bearings.   
> Section 3 promises to be a combination of Action Plot and all the resolutions you've been waiting for. Um. I hope.   
> ________

 

Finn was sitting next to Bolt’s bed while he caught up on reports. Bolt had been awake, intermittently. Kalonia was really hopeful about his recovery, despite how initially pessimistic she’d been.

They’d recovered another TIE pilot, and another Stormtrooper who’d crashed a TIE and been badly injured, and some of Statura’s men had collected them. They’d confirmed that the TIE pilot was definitely also dependent on stimulants, and had also been told to wean herself off by the same method that had nearly killed Bolt. Both of them were getting debriefed; Finn was feeling guilty about not going, but the TIE pilot in particular was so incoherent he wouldn’t know the difference.

The drug dependency, and incorrect information, was a somewhat brutal way of hedging one’s bets, Finn supposed. Plausibly deniable all around, but the most-informed of your defectors would then be incapacitated within a short timeframe of falling into enemy hands. He wasn’t sure, though, whether the Resistance medics were expected to have picked up on it by now.

That was all that this campaign really had as far as a coherent, overarching theme: uncertainty. It was still unclear whether they were meant to be spies. It was still uncertain whether the underlying mission statement was sincere or not. Finn was the only one who was sure that the operatives didn’t have any underlying secret programming.

A soft sound attracted his attention, and he looked up to see Organa in the doorway of the room. She was staring at Bolt, hands over her mouth.

Oh. She hadn’t seen him before, Finn remembered. Bolt hadn’t debriefed with her before he’d collapsed. “You see it too,” Finn said. “I kept worrying I was imagining it, but most of the pilots agree, he looks a lot like Poe.”

She composed herself a little, and came into the room, coming to stand over the bed and look down into Bolt’s face. “It’s not just a resemblance,” she said softly, and put her hand very gently to Bolt’s face, pushing the hair away from his forehead, running her fingers along the edge of his cheek.

“No?” Finn asked, puzzled.

Organa nodded slowly. She glanced over at the chrono display on the wall, and came and sat down in the chair next to Finn’s. “Let me tell you a story,” she said. “About the Lost Kings of Oaxctli.”

“A story,” Finn said.

Organa nodded, and laced her hands together in her lap. “Back in the days of the old Republic,” she said. “No. Farther back. Before the discovery of faster-than-light space travel, there were a series of worlds populated by nations of people who lived their lives by the clock of those worlds’ seasons, who measured time in seasonal rituals and derived their collective identity from the rhythms and energies of their planets.”

“That sounds nice,” Finn said, considering it. He’d never really thought about seasons, as such. He’d spent enough time planetside to have seen seasonal changes, and he’d learned, of course, about the concept, but he’d never considered what it would be like to really measure time that way. You ran into it a lot, in stories set on planets-- marking the passage of time by what season it was, and so on.

“One of the first groups that mastered interstellar travel was the Ibericans,” Organa went on. “They sent out sleeper ships, where most of the passengers were in stasis to pass the long times of travel, and as technology improved, they were some of the first to master faster-than-light travel on a large scale.”

“Iberican is that language that you and Poe speak,” Finn said, earnestly trying to connect the dots.

Organa nodded. “The Ibericans established outposts on these worlds, and in some cases it was friendly and in others it was less-friendly, but gradually they had begun to assimilate these nations into their identity, had begun to replace their own languages with theirs. Much of it is lost to history, it was so long ago, but the one I know the most about was the planet of Xicul.”

Finn had never made that particular consonant sound with his mouth before, and he worked on it now. It was a tight aspirative, or a breathy guttural. A hard H, more or less. “Xicul,” he said.

Organa nodded. “Xicul was not all that far from my home planet of Alderaan,” she said. “It was a lovely little planet, and most famous for a majestic valley that was the center of culture on the planet, for the nation of the Oaxctli. In the stone walls of that valley, in ancient times, the people had carved the faces of their kings, or gods. Those carvings were famous, and the images of them have passed into lore. You have seen them, I would wager, but you didn’t know what they were.”

Finn handed over his datapad when she held her hand out, and she keyed in a quick search. “They have been more or less adopted into the heraldry of several organizations by now,” she said, “because of what they meant and what they came to mean after the destruction of Xicul.”

“Destruction,” Finn said.

“Well,” Organa said. She pulled up a holo, a scenery photo of a landscape-- an aerial shot of a valley with a stone wall, and giant carved stone faces set into them, in profile-- men with strong hooked noses and huge elaborate headdresses. “A mining company bought the mineral rights to the planet, somehow, and the details of the deal are lost to the mists of time and corruption. Several of the homeworlds underwent similar fates. The mining companies destroyed not only much of the surface of the planets, but also their cores. The ecological systems of the planets began to collapse. Crops failed, and the inhabitants were forced to leave, to go out into the galaxy at large to find jobs, to find food, to find homes. The nations began to disperse.”

“That’s sad,” Finn said. “How could the mining companies do that?”

“Because it was profitable,” Organa said. “In the days of the Republic, sometimes corruption won out over everything. If there was money in it, the interests of the people were overruled. But it was even worse once the Empire took power, just about the time when I was born. Under the Empire, the last protections that were keeping the Oaxctli’s last toehold on the planet evaporated. The mining company systematically evicted the last of them, hunted them down like animals, with rifles, and completed the destruction of the planet. Now Xicul is a bare rock sphere with no atmosphere, and the sacred valley was destroyed when the planet’s crust became unstable.”

“That’s awful,” Finn said.

“A group of the last survivors wound up on Alderaan,” Organa said. “They came to petition Alderaan’s Senator, Bail Organa, to help them. Their planet was gone, but they wanted to find a new homeworld, find a new place where their crops could grow, where they could try to re-establish their seasonal rituals, where they could try to rebuild themselves a collective identity.”

“Bail Organa,” Finn said, noting the name.

“My adoptive father,” Organa said. “When the Republic failed, he was left with little power, but he worked as hard as he could for as many causes as he could. I come into the story now, a little; I remember the Oaxctli. Their leader was a woman named Lita, a strong and determined woman who I came to admire very much. She was a young woman at the beginning, but very, how do I describe her?” Organa breathed out slowly, and considered. “She was powerful in her convictions, in a way I have seldom seen.”

Finn was still looking at the holoimage search results of the stone carvings, and had loaded more examples. Some of them were line drawings, and he realized as he looked closer that some of them were line drawings on skin-- tattoos.

“One of the organizations that has adopted the Lost Kings of Oaxctli into their heraldry is the Outer Rim gang Fronteras,” Organa said. “Many of their members have tattoos like that. They’re primarily Iberican, as an organization, but as successive waves of refugees left Xicul, many of them fell in with Fronteras.”

“I know Fronteras,” Finn said.

“If you want cargo hauled,” Organa said, “they’ve done an exceptional job at building themselves a network. I count them among our best allies. They’re very pro-Resistance.”

Finn contemplated that a moment. “I think I knew that,” he said. He knew Fronteras had fought against the First Order. But he was preoccupied, still staring at those carved stone faces. They were familiar, was the thing.

“So my father and mother tried to help the Oaxctli find a new homeworld,” Organa said. “But when the Death Star was built, and Grand Moff Tarkin ordered its superlaser to be tested, the leaders of the Oaxctli were on Alderaan, along with my parents. And so when that world was destroyed, so were they.”

“Oh,” Finn said.

“Most of them weren’t on the planet at the time,” Organa said. “Most of the young able-bodied Oaxctli were working, out wherever in the galaxy they could find work. Including Lita’s son Kes. The ones who died with Alderaan were mostly their elders. But still, it shattered the last of their identity as a culture, and destroyed the last hope they really had to all collect together again and keep their old ways alive.”

Finn had to look away from the datapad, over at Bolt, whose eyes were open. “Oh,” he said, and Bolt looked at him and blinked.

“It just happened,” Organa said, “that Kes’s wife Shara Bey was also offworld, working, and had their young son Poe with her, and her father. They were both pilots, the Beys, and if they could get gigs together, with one piloting and the other copiloting, they’d take the baby along with them.”

“Oh,” Finn said, and that was the connection, then. “So that’s why Poe’s face looks like those stone carvings.”

“And so does Bolt’s,” Organa said. “It’s not so much a family resemblance, but it’s the same thing on a bigger scale.” She stood up, and went over to the bed to look down at Bolt, who was awake and aware and watching her. “How much of that did you hear?”

“Enough,” Bolt said, and stared up at her. “I was. I have fought with Fronteras before.” He hesitated, chewing on his lower lip. His face was creased and puffy with sleep and sickness, shadows under his eyes. “And I was shot down and they captured me and one other, and the First Order got me back and reconditioned me and said it was to help me forget that they tortured me and killed the other one but-- they didn’t, did they.” He ran out of air, and seemed to shrink down into himself, miserable. “They didn’t torture me.”

“No,” Organa said gently. “They would have told you who you were.”

“Do I have a name?” Bolt asked. He had tears running down from the corners of his eyes, now.

“I don’t know,” Organa said. “I don’t know your family. But I know your people. Do you remember anything?”

“No,” Bolt said. “Not-- not from before.”

Organa reached over and took his hands, and held them between both of hers. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to find your actual immediate family,” she said. “But I know I can find your people.”

“You said they were all dead,” Bolt said.

Organa smiled softly. “Not all,” she said. 

 

___________

 

 

“So here’s the thing,” Poe said, elbows on the dashboard as he held his head, eyes shut to ease the eyestrain headache. He’d been doing math for the last half an hour at least, working out the long way what locations they had enough fuel to make a hyperspace jump to. They couldn’t get to any obvious Resistance strongholds. They had just enough for the shortest possible jump, and it wouldn’t get them anywhere particularly good. But they had a few choices.

Rey was underneath the console, fixing some wiring or other, Poe had lost track because everything on this hunk of junk was broken. He’d wanted to show her the math for calculating jumps herself, because apparently she’d always relied on the ship computers, and that was incredibly dangerous and also wasteful of fuel.

After a moment she squirmed and wriggled out from under the console, and Poe cracked an eye open to look down at her. She had grease or something across her forehead, and looked a little harried and really-- adorable, actually. “What’s the thing?” she asked, very slightly exasperated.

He summoned his nerve. “So I had a mission,” he said. “When I got stuck on the _Unyielding_ , that was a kind of-- I took a detour. I was on a different mission.”

“Oh?” Rey looked interested. “You’d mentioned you’d left one incomplete.”

“Yeah,” Poe said. He chanced a look up at the list of potential locations, squinting against the pain. “This one.”

Rey pulled herself up to sit in the co-pilot’s chair, leaning forward avidly to look at the list of destinations. _Stars_ , she was gorgeous, she was so incredible-- and not, like, the usual head-turning pretty, not sparkling eyes and swinging hips and that sort of thing. She was bright, keen and sharp, she was like a small self-contained star of some kind, and Poe was hopelessly smitten. She was also almost young enough that he could be her father, in some alternate universe where okay he’d’ve been twelve, so not really, but still. He felt like a filthy old man. Worse, she was approximately as perfect as Finn, and if the two of them ever got a chance to spend any time together it was nearly certain they’d wind up together. Poe’s chest hurt in a way that could have been either anticipation or disappointment every single time he thought of it, but that didn’t mean he could stop thinking about it. They’d be so perfect together, so beautiful, so entrancing-- so powerful, really, so sharp and smart and competent, and in his more holonovela-level dramatic moments Poe contemplated whether it would be possible for him to just spontaneously self-immolate upon witnessing such a consummation.

It was very dramatic. Poe was indulging himself inwardly with a lot of drama. Keeping as much of it to himself as he could manage, though. If she was overhearing any of it with her Force powers of mind-reading, she was being polite, which was as much as he could expect. (He knew she wasn’t; he was used to it enough that he could usually tell.)

“Have you been to any of these places?” Rey asked, licking her lower lip as she brought up two of the destinations to look at them side by side. Stars-- it wasn’t even sexual, particularly, Poe just wanted to be near her. He wasn’t really Force-sensitive but that was probably part of it-- he had no real sensitivity, but more awareness than most people, and he could feel her all the time, and it pulled him in like an electric light drew a particularly stupid insect. He just wanted to batter himself to death on her.

No, he didn’t, that was gross and creepy. He just wanted to die for her, like he wanted to die for the General. And he got made fun of for it a lot but he knew what was behind it. His whole life he’d absent-mindedly figured that everyone was right-- he’d either die gloriously in military service or die ignominiously in some sort of disgraced exile, and his whole career he’d been gunning for the glorious ending instead.

Ugh. He wished they had some booze on this craft. If he couldn’t fly it, he really could use with a nice thorough miserable sorrow-drowning. This level of self-awareness wasn’t sustainable.

He sighed. “I’ve been to several of them,” he said. “This one’s the mission,” and he pointed to it. “The rest are-- well, I mean. We have options.”

“So what’s the mission?” Rey asked, chewing on her lip where she’d licked it.

He shoved his hand through his hair, and pulled on it, trying to ground himself. It wasn’t enough, but thinking about the mission did the trick a little better. “So the thing is,” he said. “In the aftermath of the destruction of the Hosnian system, some of the Senators of the former New Republic pretty openly came out for the First Order. My mission was to go and sabotage one of them, prevent him handing off his planet straight to the First Order.” He tapped the destination. “We have a number of sympathizers embedded on this planet. None of them can act; they’d be too certainly found out. So I was going to come in and do the dirty work, and get out before anyone noticed. That would leave all our operatives with clean alibis.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s time-sensitive. The big handover to the First Order was going to be sometime this coming week. If they didn’t send anyone else, then there’s nothing to prevent the handover.”

“If they have sent someone else,” Rey said, “then we’d run into them, and they’d be able to help us get back.”

“Or,” Poe said, “at least they could get our message through. If they haven’t, we might at least be able to evacuate with our operatives who are there.” He considered that. “Except even they might be swayed by the sheer size of the bounty on my head.”

“I don’t have a bounty,” Rey said. “Or if I do, it’s not as well-known.”

“Point,” Poe said. He rubbed his face with his hands. “If I weren’t fucking _useless_ , this would all be a lot more feasible.” Whoops. He’d been trying not to get dramatic. “Sorry.” He shoved his hands through his hair and let his breath out. “Sorry. Okay. So-- we think the mission’s maybe the way to go?”

Rey was watching him, chin on hand, elbow on control panel. “What if the First Order handover has already happened?” she asked. “Do we have any way of finding that out?”

Poe chewed his lip. “Not from here,” he said. “We have one hyperspace jump in this thing, which we could use to get somewhere we could attempt to get information, but then we’d have to somehow get the ship refueled before we could jump again.” He retrieved his datapad from the pocket behind the copilot’s seat, and unlocked the hidden folder that had the mission briefing in it. “Here,” he said. “Read this, you’ll know as much as I do about the situation. Tell me what you think, and we’ll make our choice.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “I’ll be in the bunk trying to get this headache under control so I can show you the hyperspace math.”

Rey was already reading, and gave him an absent-minded thumbs-up.

 

__________

 

 

Finn generally tried not to let people see him entering or leaving Poe’s hut. He only went there as a self-indulgence and he tried not to let on too much that he had any needs that direction. He was uncomfortably aware of how much scrutiny he was subjected to. But sometimes he just had to come somewhere he knew he’d be alone. And it still smelled like Poe in here, a little, and he could sit for a moment and remember how comforting he’d found Poe, early on.

He closed the door behind himself before he reached over and switched on the light on the desk, and so he startled badly when he turned and saw that the hut was occupied.

It was still the rainy season, still relentlessly pounding rain for hours every day, and they’d had to haul in gravel to improve the paths. But the mud wasn’t enough, it seemed, to keep BB-8 away.

“Magic Fixer Guy,” BB-8 burbled quietly, subdued. Ey was sitting in the corner next to the desk, as if hiding.

“Hey,” Finn said, and sat down on the floor. It hurt his leg, but it was only a faint pull of pain; he was nearly healed.

BB-8 rolled and pressed emself against Finn’s side. “I need to be told what to do,” ey said. “I don’t have a task and I-- think I am malfunctioning.”

“You miss Poe,” Finn said.

“I am not a sapient,” BB-8 said. “I am not-- I don’t-- why do I _miss_ him?”

“I’m not a philosopher,” Finn said. “I don’t know about droids and emotions. But you miss him. I know. I miss him too. I know how that works.”

“He told Skywalker to have me reset,” BB-8 said, very quietly and slowly. “He doesn’t-- he promised me, when I was first activated, that he wouldn’t reset me. I’m an experimental prototype, a different kind of learning AI, and they chose him to be the test user because he was so interested in organic learning. A reset would be the same as killing me.”

Finn wasn’t positive what all the words meant. Some of it was the translation from Binary, though he’d kept up his studies and was pretty decent at it now. Some of it, though, was that he hadn’t made any particular study into how artificial intelligences learned at all. He was not equipped for this, but he didn’t really need to understand the words to get the gist. “B,” he said, and used his thumb to clean a smudge of mud off the edge of the little droid’s main optical sensor. “It’s not a reflection on you, that Poe would feel that way. He’s hurt pretty bad, from what Skywalker said. He’s got a lot to think about. When humans are hurting, it makes them cruel and sharp, and they say things they maybe don’t mean.”

“It’s a well-known truth,” BB-8 said, “that humans never feel as strongly about their droids as the other way around. It’s inevitable, I’ve known since my circuit boards were assembled: you will be betrayed, someday, by a human who made you feel special and treated you like a person, and in the end, just thinks of you as a thing, and disposes of you like one.”

“Poe is probably more scared than he’s ever been in his life,” Finn said. “And with us-- it’s a lot messier, B. We don’t have subroutines and protocols that we know of. We can’t really get reset. I know, because they used to try to reset me, and it never works right.”

“I can’t help him,” BB-8 said fretfully, rolling back and forth in place. Finn tightened his grip on the droid, holding em in position.

“Where do you think he is?” Finn asked. “You know him better than anyone.”

“He didn’t have any money,” BB-8 said. “We left him behind without anything to run with. He didn’t have a ship. He didn’t have traveling papers. He didn’t have anything.”

“Except Rey,” Finn said. “And Rey’s done more with less.”

BB-8 considered that, swiveling eir sensor array slightly from side to side. In a moment, ey switched on the projector, and popped up a holo of a mission dossier. “We were on our way to this mission when we happened across the _Unyielding_ ,” ey said thoughtfully. “And we debated not stopping, but Poe decided at the last second that it was worth it, since nobody had been in direct contact with that ship yet. But this was an important mission and if they haven’t sent another agent there, the whole planet could fall to the First Order.”

Finn looked at the holo, skimmed the specifics of it. It wasn’t the kind of mission they’d given him; he had been far more concerned with existing First Order assets, and only occasional forays into exploring the sympathies of the sympathetic.

“Huh,” he said. “You think he’d go there with Rey?”

BB-8 made an indeterminate beeping noise. “Maybe?” ey offered finally.

 

_____________

 

Rey had made Poe a crutch he could use to walk. His balance was good enough now that he could mostly get around that way. He had to be careful and move slowly and keep his head still, but it was better than being stuck on the ship.

They landed at the most dire, forsaken port on the planet, on the hunch that fuel might be cheaper there. Poe really really wanted to fill up, at least enough to make another jump, before they made any real attempt to explore politics. He wanted to be able to get away.

But their remaining handful of credits wouldn’t even pay for the connection fee for the fuel hose, not even at this little backwater. Which was about what Poe had thought. And Rey still refused to use the Force to suggest that perhaps they had in fact already paid.

Fair, but Poe had never been the sort who preferred to be dead and principled.

Probably just as well he had no particular connection to the Force.

Before they’d even landed, they’d caught a news holo talking, again, about how much money the First Order was willing to pay for one measly crippled pilot. “I think those are paid advertisements,” Poe had said. “Like, I really think the First Order is paying them to talk about it.”

“It’s an impressive bounty,” Rey’d pointed out.

“If we had the bounty money we’d never have to worry about fuel money again,” Poe’d said. “Well. You wouldn’t. I mean, if I thought you’d actually get paid, I’d suggest that. Go ahead and sell me.”

“Don’t joke,” Rey had snapped. Evidently he’d hit a nerve, but he wasn’t sure which element of the comment had done it, so he’d just shut his mouth.

 

Poe sent his feelers out, the way he would have if he were running the mission for real. But for real, he would have followed up, setting up a rendezvous. And his face would have done most of the hard work of establishing his position; it wasn’t great, for a spy, but it worked for this kind of thing: people knew who he was. Now, though. Too many people knew who he was. It was too dangerous, if there wasn’t an escape plan. So the Resistance agents on the planet, now, along with anyone who’d infiltrated enough to know where to look, all knew there was someone here to help them, but that was as far as he dared go, until he could get some fuel in that damn ship.

 

It was a dire little port, not a lot of off-planet traffic. Poe had abandoned the elderly disguise; his beard had really come in by now, after so long unable to hold steady enough to shave it, so he looked a bit like a wild man. (He’d never actually grown a beard before, he’d always managed to get a razor through it before this stage up to now, and he was a bit disconcerted by just how aggressive and bushy the beard turned out to be. He hadn’t known he had that in him. His father’d worn a beard for years but it had always been neatly trimmed, and Poe had literally no idea how to achieve that effect; he’d never planned on doing it, himself, so he’d never noted how it was done. Clippers, he supposed.)

Instead, to Rey’s enormous amusement, he took his comb and a jar of conditioning oil and set to his due-for-a-haircut mop, and made it worse. By the time he was done, it was an almost architectural mass of tangled-looking chaos. Poe eyed it critically, then went through their combined stock of clothing and outfitted himself.

“You’re not very much bigger than I am,” Rey reflected, looking enchanted by that fact. It was kind of the opposite of a size-difference kink, Poe thought, but kept it to himself as he wound one of her sashes around his waist and tied it haphazardly. He was wearing one of her tunics, too, and it wasn’t anything he’d normally be caught dead in, but he was so scrawny at the moment that it fit, albeit tightly, and made him look even skinnier.

He knew he was a slight man, he knew that was just his body type and he was never going to have big muscles or a physically imposing presence. He normally dressed to accentuate his trim figure, but he tended to go for jackets that fit looser in the shoulders to at least give some illusion that he wasn’t just a slip of a thing. And he normally wasn’t… quite _such_ a slip of a thing. He was really scrawny. It was dismaying.

“You could certainly kick my ass without trying,” Poe agreed, a little mournfully. It wasn’t fair, how hard it was to put on muscle and how fast it went away. His arms were still a _little_ beefier than hers, but her narrow frame was like steel and his was more like… uncooked noodles.

This was possibly the smallest his waist had ever been as an adult, which might be sort of cute except his ass seemed smaller too. Great. He settled on a pair of his own trousers, which were baggy now, and the sandals he had habitually carried to wear in strange freshers so as not to get exotic fungal toe infections in nasty spaceports.

“I wouldn’t, though,” Rey said. “I like you.”

It wasn’t really enough to console him. He looked in the mirror, standing as far away as he could to get the full effect. He looked like the alcoholic ne’er-do-well lazy uncle in, like, every holonovela ever. This was why he took so much care with his hair and his beard. Ugh. “Well,” he said, grimacing. “I look like a bum. Would you recognize me, if you hadn’t watched all that?”

He slouched on the crutch, doing his best to look drunk instead of rhyndo’d. “No,” Rey said, “I wouldn’t recognize you.”

“Good,” he said, regarding his reflection without pleasure. He’d sort of known he was… well, he hadn’t really thought of himself as vain, but it was doing a hell of a number on him to look at himself and see nothing he liked. Something about Rey moved him to honesty, maybe, because he unnecessarily said, “I hate looking like this.”

“Like what?” Rey asked, and she wasn’t making fun, she seemed genuine.

“Ugly,” Poe said, surprising himself. He made a face. “I guess I didn’t realize I was vain.” He sighed. “Pull yourself together, Dameron.”

“I don’t think you look ugly,” Rey said, surprised. “You’re still— I mean, you’re _you_ ,” she finished, with a little hand-wave, like that was supposed to mean something.

“I’m not supposed to be me, that’s the point,” Poe said, “though I suppose there’s really not much point debating it.” He steeled himself. “So, we have no bonafides to introduce ourselves to the Resistance, and no escape plan, so we’re going to need to play it by ear. Clearly, my cover story is that I’m a shiftless drunk crippled bum, but we need a cover story for you, and why you would associate with someone like me.”

Rey came and stood next to him. She had boots on, so they were nearly the same height. With him leaning on the crutch, she was taller. Her gaze was direct and unsettling, and he wasn’t sure what she was looking at, or for. “I could be your sister,” she said, “but it might be more of a disguise if I pretend to be your lover instead.” She looked uncertain. “I don’t know if I’m that good at pretending, I don’t know what-- lovers do, really. But I know people would expect it.”

“I don’t know that anyone would buy that we were blood relatives,” Poe said, and he was-- was he nervous? He was nervous. “But you’re so clearly--” He gestured, at a loss for words. “And I’m a bum. Nobody would believe you’d willingly hang out with me if you didn’t have some kind of-- connection.”

“Lovers it is, then,” Rey said.

“You flinch whenever I touch you,” Poe pointed out. “We could play that up, but there would have to be a reason why you’d let me be an asshole to you when you so obviously could break me in half.”

“I only flinch because I don’t know what else to do,” Rey said, and she looked-- ashamed. Shit. She clearly cared what Poe thought of her and he couldn’t make her understand that there was no reason to do that. “I’m not very-- experienced. At things.”

“You can truthfully tell anyone who asks that we started our relationship when I used a truly terrible pickup line on you,” Poe said. “So um. Do you want to practice touching people?”

She laughed, which was what he had wanted-- a good laugh, really amused. “Okay,” she said. She reached out and took his hand. “I have practice at this.”

Her hand was warmer than his, and he wrapped his fingers around her palm. Could he really-- well. Stupid question. He had no choice but to do whatever was necessary. He shifted the grip of his hand and interlaced his fingers with hers. “Holding hands can mean nothing, or a lot of things,” he said. He shuffled, a little awkwardly with the crutch, and moved across the little ship to the cockpit. She followed, watching their conjoined hands. He set the crutch against the dashboard and sat down, looking up at her, wrapping both hands around her hand. His vision went double for a moment, and the Rey on the left looked trepidatious while the Rey on the right looked interested.

“C’mere,” he said, tugging gently on her hand. “Sit down. Let’s establish the ground rules and then it won’t seem like such a big deal.”

She hesitated, then turned and sat sideways across his lap, settling down gingerly. “Aren’t I heavy?” she asked.

“No,” he said. He put his arms around her middle, not touching her with his hands at all, just the insides of his elbow, and in a long plane of contact, not a point. “Put your weight mostly on your thighs, and across my thighs, and it’s really not much at all.”

She looked at him, and his vision cleared enough that he could make out her expression as hesitant, but not upset. “I think I was a little child and sat like this,” she said.

“It’s different,” he said. He could feel that she was still holding herself rigid. “It’s okay. Get comfortable. You can slouch. You’re not going to hurt me or-- give me ideas, y’know? I know what’s up, here. It’s fine. So the next step is just acting like you belong.”

She laughed, and let herself slump a little bit, settled into his grip. She wound up leaning back into his arms a little bit, and it instantly felt much more comfortable. “Oh,” she said, feeling it too.

He made himself relax too, loosening his muscles, tipping his head back against the back of the seat to look up at her. “So I won’t touch you with my hands anywhere you don’t want me to,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve had a lot of people touch you that you didn’t want to? I have and sometimes I don’t like it either.”

“No,” she said. “Nobody touches me. I don’t-- nobody does.”

“Good,” he said, relieved-- at least he didn’t have to deal with residual trauma in one particularly, horribly common way. Then he realized how that sounded. “I mean. Not-- good, but. I mean.” He sighed, and tipped his head forward, resting his forehead against her shoulder. “I have a reputation for being smooth but it’s actually totally false.”

“No no,” she said, “terrible pickup lines. Practice those.”

It struck Poe with renewed force then, that she’d missed out on some bad things along with the good, and he raised his face to look up at her. “You haven’t been ineptly hit on in bars,” he said. “I mean, how many terrible bars have you spent any time in?”

“None really,” she said. “Not-- only in passing. Nobody’s tried to, uh, pick me up.”

He grinned. “Oh my stars,” he said. “You won’t have heard any of these. Hold on, I have to remember some.”

“I’ve seen it in holodramas,” she said. “Women in holodramas put up with things I wouldn’t.”

“Not everyone is as good at hand-to-hand combat as you are,” Poe said. “I’m certainly not.”

She put her arm around his neck, a little woodenly; she’d clearly seen the gesture and wanted to try it but wasn’t sure how. Her finger were warm against the back of his neck, and he tried not to react but couldn’t help but lean into it a little bit. “Leave the hand-to-hand combat to me,” she said. “I’ll protect you. You’re my worthless boyfriend, after all.” She smiled, and it was-- fond? Was she acting? Or did she actually-- stop it, he told himself, that’s not the point.

“Is there a mirror in your pocket,” he asked, and it came out a little dazed, “because I can see myself in your pants.”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” she said, delighted. “It would have to be at such an angle-- that’s so stupid.”

“I know,” he said. She moved her fingers-- she was petting him, just above the hairline, and he should tell her that was maybe too much versimilitude, but-- “You know,” he said, mustering up an eyebrow wriggle, “that shirt looks fantastic on you, but you know?” He crinkled up his eyes and bit his lip. “I think it would look even better on my bedroom floor.”

She threw her head back and laughed, a real belly laugh. “That’s great!” she said. “That’s so cheap! I love it!”

“Oh man,” Poe said. “It’s a while since I thought about these. I think I had more of them used on me than by me, at least? This is blowing my average, here.”

“More,” Rey said, leaning forward a little. “C’mon.”

“Some of ‘em, it’s not the line per se,” Poe said, “it’s just like... “ He screwed up his face, thinking about it, then put on his best seductive look, looking up under his lashes and biting his lip. “You come here often, doll?”

“I like the cheap ones,” she said, kicking her feet a little bit. He tightened his grip on her, locking his hand around his wrist.

“Someone once said to me,” he said, looking down, “in apparent seriousness, and I’m not kidding.” He looked up at her, and cocked an eyebrow. “That’s a nice jacket. Wanna fuck?”

Rey laughed again, in pure delight. “Did it work?” she asked.

“No it didn’t work!” Poe said, feigning offense. “You think I’m that easy? I’m not that easy! C’mon.”

Rey trailed her fingers around from the back of his neck to his jaw, as if to tip his head up. It sent a shiver down his spine and he thought, _I have to tell her not to do that_ , but he couldn’t bring himself to. “Tell me the kind of lines that _do_ work on you, then,” she said.

“That one,” he said, a little awestruck. “That was a good one.” Fortunately, it made her laugh, instead of creeping her out, like maybe it should have. She ran her thumb along his cheekbone and smiled at him.

“In holodramas couples are always touching each other’s faces,” she said, keeping her thumb moving. “I always wondered why that was a thing.”

“Uh,” Poe said intelligently.

“Oh, shit,” she said, dismayed, and pulled her hand away from his face. “I was projecting, wasn’t I?”

“Uh,” Poe said, blinking. “What?”

“Luke warned me that if I’m not careful I can influence people without really meaning to,” she said. “And I’ve spent so much time in your head, you’re used to letting me.”

“Oh,” he said. “No, that’s-- I’m okay. You’re not-- doing anything to me.” _Get a grip, Dameron. Pull it together. Come on._

“You’re sure?” she asked, putting her hand on his shoulder instead. “You looked-- confused.”

“No,” he said, “I’m sure. It’s all right.”

“Kissing,” Rey said, frowning. “That’s a thing people do.” She was looking at his mouth.

“I don’t think we have to go that far,” Poe said, a little desperate. He wasn’t sure he’d survive it.

“Sometimes I think it sounds disgusting,” she said, “but then other times I think it might be all right. Which is it?”

“Sometimes it’s disgusting,” Poe said. “And sometimes it’s really great. Just like most things.”

Her hand slid around the back of his neck again. “Did you kiss Finn?” she asked, very softly.

He swallowed, hard. “Yes,” he managed to say.

“What was it like?” she asked.

“I don’t know how to answer that,” he said. “I’d tell you if I knew.”

She smiled, then, a strange little half-smile, but it wasn’t a sad one. “Finn was my first friend,” she said, “but I haven’t had a chance to know him very well. I saw, on your datapad, BB-8 took a lot of holopics of him, and I was glad to see how happy he looked.”

“He’s making a name for himself,” Poe said, “and making a lot of friends. He’s really smart, Rey, he’s really sharp, and he’s really figuring himself out.”

“You care a lot for him,” she said.

“I do,” Poe admitted. He tipped his head back further, pushing a little against her hand. “Hey. We need to focus. I’m a worthless drunk bum you’re inexplicably fond of, so if I put my hand on your waist you’re not going to flinch, okay?”

He unclasped his arms and set one hand palm-flat against the gap between her hipbone and ribcage, and she looked solemnly down at him. “I should scold you for your drinking, probably,” she said.

“That’s probably a good character note,” Poe said. He put his other hand across her back, watching her as he rubbed it carefully along her spine. “Even drunk, I wouldn’t touch you anywhere private in public, you know? So don’t worry about that. But your shoulders are fair game, your arms, your sides, your back, and probably if we’re sitting, your thighs. All right?”

“All right,” she said. “What about you?”

He moved his hand to just above her knee. “What? Oh. I mean--” and she moved her hand across the back of his neck, fingers sliding into his hair again, and he sucked in his breath and said, “Maybe go easy on the hair.”

“You spent so long combing it,” she said, and there was a teasing note to her voice. She carefully set her hand on top of the hair on the back of his head, very gently petting it.

“No,” he said, “I just-- really like it when people pet my hair, to the point that it’s distracting and I lose focus on what I was supposed to be doing.”

She grinned suddenly, a little delighted expression. “Well,” she said, “that’s nice.”

He made a face at her. “What’s nice about that? I get distracted, I could get us killed.”

She shook her head, still smiling. “It’s just nice to know something you like,” she said, and gently patted the top of his head.

“I like a lot of things,” he said, “I’m not complicated.” He sighed, and looked down at his hand on her leg. “I’ll keep my hands toward the outside of your leg, okay? For most people it’s the inner part that’s ticklish, so I won’t touch you there. I’ll also try to keep it firm so I don’t tickle you.”

“I don’t,” Rey said, frowning. “Think. I’m ticklish?”

“Everyone’s ticklish,” Poe said. “Not everyone giggles but everyone has sensitive bits of their body. I’m trying to be professional here.”

A little guilty, Rey pulled her hands away from his hair. “Right,” she said.

“It’s not that you can’t touch it,” he said patiently. “Just bear in mind, if I’m supposed to be focusing on something, or paying a lot of attention, it’s going to make that difficult.”

She nodded solemnly.

“As for your hair,” he said, “I know you always wear it the same way, but it would probably be smart to just-- do it differently, while we’re here.”

She blinked, and put a hand up to it. “Oh,” she said.

“Just to be slightly less recognizable.” He’d’ve liked to put her in a dress, too, but they didn’t have any. Just to change her lines in case anyone had seen her before. She hadn’t been out and about a great deal, but some, and it was silly to risk recognition over something so simple as just always having the same hair and outfit.

“Should I dress up, too?” she asked.

He nodded. “Maybe one of the jumpsuits,” he said. “And I know how to braid hair, I’ll just put it up. Would that be all right?”

She considered that. “All right,” she said, and got out of his lap. He was cold, now, used to her body heat. Funny how quickly that happened.

 

__________________

 

 

The comm was very fuzzy, blurred heavily by the artifacts of many relays to get it this distance. “Yes,” the woman said. Her name was Katia, and she was deeply undercover on Util, to the point that she was generally held to be one of the First Order’s backers. “My network tells me they received messages from a Resistance operative, with the code words we were told to look out for, but there has been no follow-up. The operative seemed to indicate that their footing on the planet was not secure.”

“The operative was supposed to be Poe Dameron,” Finn said, “if that indicates anything to you.”

There was a lag, so it took a moment for the woman’s expression to change from patient listening to moderate alarm. “Oh,” she said, “he’s been all over the news holos. I had wondered. That could explain his hesitance to contact us overtly. Is it true, what they did to him?”

“I don’t know,” Finn said, “the people we had looking after him until we could retrieve him tried to sell him out so he ran.” He could feel Leia, behind him and off-camera, thinking something strongly— probably that brutal honesty was probably not the tactic she’d’ve gone for in his place— but Finn wasn’t seeing a better approach. “We don’t know where he is, because if he lets us know, he’d have to let dozens of other people know, any one of whom might be tempted by that huge bounty. Including, frankly, your people.”

Katia nodded, wry expression discernable through the distortion. “Fair,” she said. “There are always people in a network you’re not totally sure of. That’s why you don’t ever let anyone know everything.” She sighed. “Or? The so-called Resistance operative is not, in fact, a frightened Dameron, but is a First Order plant hoping to hide behind that confusion. Could they know that he was to come here?”

Finn turned his head a little; he couldn’t see Leia without moving more, but she’d know he was asking her. She sent him an equivocating mental affirmative. “They could, perhaps,” Finn said, “but it’s not likely. He wasn’t in custody long enough to have been interrogated in any depth.”

“Did the Order have him?” Katia asked.

Finn shook his head. “No,” he said, “not directly. It was Order sympathizers on a Republic vessel, who intended to sell him for the bounty.” He made a face. “So you can see how we’d believe there wasn’t much interest in getting information out of him. It was money, not ideology.”

“What a fucking waste,” Katia said, and it sounded incongruous; she was an older woman, perhaps Leia’s age, iron-haired and commanding and regally arrayed even though this comm was happening from a hidden room in the back of an unknown hideout on almost no notice. “I knew Dameron’s mother; if he had half her talent it’s a criminal shame to destroy a pilot like that for stupid _money_.”

“Money talks, baby,” Finn said, and he’d gotten that from a holodrama he’d stayed up far too late watching with BB-8 (who had an excellent collection, including a bunch in a language Finn didn’t know, that BB-8 had told him was Iberican; B had been apologetic about lacking the translator chips). He wouldn’t know the first thing about money. He’d never bought a thing in his life. Organa had mentioned paying him, and he had no idea what he’d do with it if she did. “I didn’t know his mother, but I can assure you, he’s a hell of a pilot. Don’t write him off. Even if they have rhyndo’d him, he’s still a brilliant mind.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Katia said. “So if it is Dameron, he’d be injured and on the lam, and probably without access to much by way of resources.”

“Yes,” Finn said slowly. “We sort of… seem to have trusted the people whose care he was left in too much, and he had to cut and run.” _Do I tell_ , he asked Leia. They’d been practicing non-verbal communication. It wasn’t foolproof. He got a vague feeling of assent. “The only thing in his favor is that perhaps he’s not alone.”

“That’s both good and complicated,” Katia said. “Who is his companion? We need some way to determine whether this so-called Resistance operative is him or not. Would your people have sent anyone else?”

“No,” Finn said, reasonably confident that’s what Leia wanted him to say. She should have conducted this interview directly, rather than let him practice. “His companion would be a young woman.” He bit his lip. Leia pressed at the back of his mind. “A Force user.”

Katia’s eyebrows went up as the lag caught up. “A Force user,” she said.

“Mm,” Finn said.

Leia pressed harder, and the words came into his mind, then. _We’ll send someone else now._

“If it’s a First Order plant,” Finn said, “or if it’s Dameron, either way, we should send backup. I may come myself.”

“I would like to meet you,” Katia said. “I would very much like to meet you.”

“A lot of people would,” Finn said. “Most of them to kill me. We’ll be in touch, I’m sure.”

 

 

“You don’t have to go,” Leia said.

“But I want to,” Finn said. “And you know I don’t want a lot of things. This, I want.”

“The point of the mission was to be subtle,” she said.

“I guess Dameron’s better at that than me,” Finn said. “But I think the time for subterfuge is about past, on that planet. It’s gotta come openly to it, sooner or later.”

Leia considered Finn for a long moment, and having a little Force training went precisely nowhere in abating how unsettling her deep regard was. If she didn’t want you to know what she was thinking, you didn’t know what she was thinking, and heightened sensitivity only let you see that most of the time she cloaked herself in constant, simmering fury. She hadn’t been lying; anger was in fact the _best_ weapon against the Dark Side. And the Light Side. And, come to think of it, just about anything.

“I trust you,” she said finally, and stood up and left, and that was that.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope y'all appreciate what I had to do to get this update out today / on time! I promise I'll get back to answering comments as soon as I can. My phone eats them, I can't even tell you-- it's so frustrating. Anyway. 
> 
> My sister has an organic farm and I'm visiting to help, and I'm staying in an actual [honest-to-god ger (yurt)](http://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/146131204349/ger-sweet-ger), which I self-inserted into this series as the huts that the Resistance staff are housed in, I am not making that up-- and it's cozier than you'd think, remarkably wind-resistant, nicely waterproof so far, and I promise I'll put pics up on my Tumblr one of these days. BUT, the wifi doesn't reach it. So. That's putting a damper on things, or would be, if not for the fact that I'm so exhausted I just go to bed when dinner is done.  
> So. That's only through the end of the week, and then I'll be back in touch with the world. I promise.  
> And I'll have a title and the first chapter of that sequel up. I promise!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cover for "Can't Go Home This Way" by bomberqueen17](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10302917) by [RunawayMarbles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RunawayMarbles/pseuds/RunawayMarbles)




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